[libvirt] [PATCH] Add a MAINTAINERS file to suggest reviewers for patches

[Daniel P. Berrangé]

On Wed, May 09, 2018 at 10:46:19AM +0200, Jiri Denemark wrote:
> On Tue, May 08, 2018 at 14:07:31 +0100, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
> > Currently all patches are simply sent to the main libvirt development
> > mailing list. Sometimes individual developers are also CC'd but this is
> > typically the exception.
> > 
> > Libvirt does not follow a subsystem maintainer model, so there is no
> > notion of owners for the different areas of code, but there certainly
> > are people with high levels of expertize in specific areas.
> > 
> > This patch thus proposes pulling in QEMU's  get_maintainer.pl script and
> > creating MAINTAINERS file to list who the experts are for specific
> > areas. Combined with git-pubish, this will help ensure that patches are
> > brought to the attention of people with direct expertize.
> > 
> > For example:
> > 
> > $ git show b04629b62934caa8786e73c3db985672422fc662 | \
> >     ./build-aux/get_maintainer.pl
> > Jim Fehlig <jfehlig at suse.com> (maintainer:libxl)
> > libvir-list at redhat.com (open list:All patches)
> > 
> > Or
> > 
> > $ git show e7cb9c4e230c3c77e35e72334c261b5b0a2211c6 | \
> >     ./build-aux/get_maintainer.pl
> > Jiri Denemar <jdenemar at redhat.com> (maintainer:CPU modelling)
> 
> s/Denemar/Denemark/g :-)
> 
> > libvir-list at redhat.com (open list:All patches)
> > 
> > Signed-off-by: Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange at redhat.com>
> 
> Anyway, I don't think we have such a high volume of patches that
> reviewers can't watch incoming mails for patches that touch an area they
> care about or are interested in. In other words, I don't mind this if
> it's optional, but I don't see a real benefit. If someone doesn't have
> time to review a particular patch, CCing them won't help anyway. And I'm
> afraid it could even cause others to not look at the patch since they
> would think the "maintainer" has to handle it.

Sure, I'm not claiming it magically makes time to review something, but we
do have a pretty high volume of incoming patches to track, making it easy
for things to get lost / missed. For people who work on libvirt only part
time, tracking all mails is a non-negligible undertaking. 

The idea of CC'ing is that it alerts people to patches where they might have
a direct interest. Even if they don't have time to review, it gives them an
alert that someone is proposing something that might be relevant / impacting
on them.

Regards,
Daniel
-- 
|: https://berrange.com      -o-    https://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange :|
|: https://libvirt.org         -o-            https://fstop138.berrange.com :|
|: https://entangle-photo.org    -o-    https://www.instagram.com/dberrange :|