Re: [Qemu-devel] We need more reviewers/maintainers!!

[Stefano Stabellini]

On Tue, 13 Mar 2012, Kevin Wolf wrote:
> Am 12.03.2012 18:34, schrieb Stefano Stabellini:
> > On Mon, 12 Mar 2012, Anthony Liguori wrote:
> >> On 03/12/2012 12:06 PM, Stefano Stabellini wrote:
> >>> Hi all,
> >>> I don't mean to steer any controversy or start any flame wars here, but
> >>> rather I want to point out a problem in the QEMU Community that is
> >>> preventing us and other people from having a good experience working
> >>> upstream with QEMU. Call it constructive criticism.
> >>>
> >>> Patches are being posted to the list that don't get any reviews at all.
> >>> Other patches get reviewed the first time, then once they are reposted
> >>> they don't get any other reviews or acked-by or reviewed-by.
> >>
> >> In all fairness, QEMU continues to grow year-to-year both in terms of 
> >> total 
> >> commits and number of contributors.
> >>
> >> The area that we struggle with is infrequent contributors that contribute 
> >> non-trivial things and are write-only contributors.
> >>
> >> In this case, I really think the problem is expecting to be a write-only 
> >> contributor.  Part of participating in a community is not only pushing 
> >> your own 
> >> patches for acceptance but also reviewing other people's patches and 
> >> participating in the discussion.  If everyone only sends patches and 
> >> doesn't 
> >> review patches, then we'll never make progress.
> >>
> >> So I'd strongly suggest trying to spend some time reviewing other people's 
> >> work. 
> >>   Right now, there are at least four different efforts around migration 
> >> yet I 
> >> don't see any of the people reviewing the other efforts.  I think this is 
> >> really 
> >> the main problem.
> > 
> > Point taken.
> > However maintainers should also be responsible of reviewing patches of
> > "infrequent write-only contributors".
> 
> Yes, but maintainers are overloaded because they also need to review
> patches of frequent write-only contributors.
 
That's why we need more maintainers!
Otherwise QEMU from an Open Source project becomes a Secret Circle project.