Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH v2] qemu-xen:Correctly expose PCH ISA bridge for IGD passthrough [and 2 more messages]

[Ian Campbell <Ian.Campbell@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 2013-05-10 at 11:09 +0100, George Dunlap wrote:
> On 10/05/13 11:00, Ian Campbell wrote:
> > On Fri, 2013-05-10 at 10:40 +0100, Pasi KÃrkkÃinen wrote:
> >>> I can only second what Ian already said - pinging on a patch that
> >>> has responses missing from the originator is bad practice. If you
> >>> wanted to ping anyone, you'd have to ping those who failed to
> >>> answer questions raised to them, not give the appearance of
> >>> requesting a patch to be taken that is only half baked.
> >>>
> >> I mostly wanted to clarify the situation with these patches,
> > Instead of adding more work to our already overburdened maintainers
> > please start in these cases by working with the submitter.
> >
> > It is the submitters responsibility to respond to queries and to keep
> > pushing the patch as necessary. If the submitter isn't engaged any more
> > then you need to either pick it up yourself or find someone else who is
> > willing to carry the patch forward, there's no point asking the
> > maintainers to clarify the situation if no one is around who is going to
> > act on their responses.
> 
> But if he were going to pick it up, or if he wants to go work with the 
> submitter, who may not have a clear understanding what the delay was 
> about or how the development process works, then he'd first need to 
> figure out what the status was, right?
>
> This sort of "facilitating" role seems like a useful thing to do to 
> allow contributions which would otherwise flounder to make it above the 
> bar into acceptance.

A facilitator should first ask the submitter what they think is going
on, and try and offer them guidance, which could be fairly generic e.g.
remind them that the need to resubmit if a patch is dropped, or it could
be more specific, i.e. reminding them of the need to respond to
particular queries made by the maintainers last time.

Yes, this means they would have needed to have read the background and
make an attempt to understand the current status first. They may not be
able to figure it out (or might get it wrong) but at least the obvious
cases can then be covered.

Facilitating can surely be useful and appreciated. But if "facilitate"
just means pinging the maintainers without having spoken to the
submitter, read up on the background and followed up on outstanding
queries then it is just making more work for maintainers for no gain and
isn't really facilitating anything.

Remember, Submitters (and facilitators) scale while maintainers do not.

Ian.



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