Re: [PATCH v1 0/9] hw/mos6522: VIA timer emulation fixes and improvements

[Finn Thain]

On Mon, 22 Nov 2021, Peter Maydell wrote:

> On Sat, 20 Nov 2021 at 23:40, Finn Thain <fthain@linux-m68k.org> wrote:
> > Anyway, thanks for taking the time to write. A competent reviewer has to
> > do much more than that, but I'm not paying for competence so I suppose I'm
> > asking too much.
> 
> Please dial back the aggressive tone here, Finn: this kind of
> thing is way out of line. We're all trying to help improve QEMU here,
> and sniping at Mark is not constructive.
> 

Peter, you seem to have misunderstood what I wrote. What I said was not 
sniping. "Incompetent" was my conclusion after I judiciously rejected 
"malicious". Here's what I mean by incompetent.


CONTRIBUTOR: Here's a patch.

MAINTAINER: I personally don't like that pattern. End of story.

CONTRIBUTOR: I don't think I'll contribute further to this project.

[Everyone loses.]


Now, here's what I would consider "competent":

CONTRIBUTOR: Here's a patch.

MAINTAINER: That pattern (I've quoted it to help further the discussion) 
is widely deprecated. You should use a different pattern instead. [Or read 
this reference. Or refer to this code.]

CONTRIBUTOR: OK, I see that this really is a problem, and I see that there 
really is a better way. However, the antipattern is already part of 
existing code, and my changes don't worsen the problem, and don't require 
that the problem persist.

MAINTAINER: You're right. My bad (I'm new to this). Since I never bothered 
to fix the existing antipattern, and no-one else thought it was worth 
fixing either, clearly it's not that important, and I should not have 
sought to veto your work, which is substantially unrelated, and beneficial 
either way.

CONTRIBUTOR: No problem.

[Everyone wins.]


Finally, here's the background for you to ponder, in case you would like 
to intervene to produce a better outcome. (I think you are potentially 
well positioned for that.)

https://lore.kernel.org/qemu-devel/cover.1629799776.git.fthain@linux-m68k.org/
https://lore.kernel.org/qemu-devel/cover.1632437396.git.fthain@linux-m68k.org/