On 04/16/2012 12:17 PM, Peter Maydell wrote:
On 16 April 2012 17:03, Andreas Färber<afaer...@suse.de> wrote:
Am 16.04.2012 18:00, schrieb Anthony Liguori:
On 04/16/2012 09:31 AM, Andreas Färber wrote:
Hello,
Sparked by conversations with Anthony and the discussion on a recent
KVM call,
I've started overhauling our MAINTAINERS file.
Patches 1-5 fix syntax issues.
Patch 6 documents our orphaned stable trees, as requested by Anthony.
Patch 7 drops the orphaned and by now completely busted darwin-user
emulation.
Apparently we have unwritten eligibility criteria for new maintainers
in terms
of qemu-devel participation and patch handling quality, but no formal
mechanism
to handle replacing lost maintainers.
The current practice has become for Anthony to expect people listed in a
MAINTAINERS section with S: Maintained to handle patches in that area
themselves
and to supply a [PULL] request to get those changes into qemu.git.
This has the downside that patches falling into an area, where a
maintainer
is listed but not responding, simply bitrot on the list.
I think we ought to aggressively downgrade subsystems if this is really
a problem. Unfortunately, it's hard to judge whether this is a problem
until someone complains about a specific subsystem.
Patches 8-11 therefore propose to upgrade some actively maintained
sections
to Maintained to formalize the Maintained vs. Odd Fixes semantics:
Maintained means PULLs from maintainer expected.
Yes. More specifically, if something is Maintained, I would expect the
patch to always come in through that specific tree.
Odd Fixes means Reviewed-by/Acked-by or committer's gut feeling is
sufficient.
Yes. Odd Fixes and below means the patch is "fair game" but that the
listed M: probably ought to at least be consulted.
The current status descriptions seem to be a copy from Linux. Could you
address Kevin's comment by proposing a change to the descriptions in our
copy?
Here's my stab at it:
Supported: Someone is actually paid to look after this. This
is the same as Maintained (see below) but you might
have a greater chance of faster response times.
Let's drop Supported as a status.
Maintained: Someone actually looks after it. The maintainer
will have a git subtree for this area and patches
are expected to go through it. Bug reports will
generally be investigated.
* For something to be marked Maintained, there must be a person on M: and there
must be a git tree for the subsystem.
Odd Fixes: It has a maintainer but they don't have time to do
much other than throw the odd patch in. Patches are
applied directly to master; there is no subtree,
and no requirement for an Ack from the maintainer
for a patch to be applied. Bug reports without
reasonable quality patches attached are likely to
go unfixed.
Orphan: No current maintainer. Send patches to qemu-devel;
persistence may be required to get something reviewed
and committed, especially if it's a large change.
Obsolete: Old code. Something tagged obsolete generally means
it has been replaced by a better system and you
should be using that.
I like these descriptions a lot more.
Regards,
Anthony Liguori
(I dropped the parenthetical about becoming a maintainer of an orphan
area; if we want to keep that I think an expanded section about how
to demonstrate that you might be capable of the job, how/when to add
sections for new code/drivers/boards, etc would be more useful.)
-- PMM
