On 29 October 2011 14:52, Alexander Graf <ag...@suse.de> wrote: > We should also show people unmaintained areas. The conclusion was a wiki > page with subsystems and status so people know what to expect. Maybe we > could generate this from the MAINTAINERS file?
Sounds like a good idea, although I think we might need to expand MAINTAINERS a bit -- I get the impression that there are a lot of "little bits" that fall into the gaps between the top-level areas marked out in MAINTAINERS. > Also, an easy way of counterfighting the feeling ignored part is > to tell people that they just hit an unmaintained area. There's > nothing more frustrating than sending a patch and get no reply. > Receiving a reply "Sorry, this area is unmaintained. Please find > someone to review it." would already be enough for most people. The difficulty that strikes me with this is that I'm not sure any one person can reliably look at a patch and say "that's for an unmaintained area" (at least, I know what areas I can review but I have no idea about everybody else...) So you can only really tell by default, ie if the patch sits for a few weeks without any reply... > A lot of people seem to also have code that doesn't make sense > upstream, for example implementing a one-off device that only > really matters for their own devboard which nobody else owns. > For such cases, having a plugin framework would be handy. I > interestingly enough got into the same discussion on LinuxCon > with some QEMU downstreams. If we get the qdev rework done then I think we're probably in a better position to have a plugin framework for devices. (There are some issues about API and ABI stability guarantees, of course.) -- PMM
