Re: [RFC PATCH 1/4] docs/devel: add a maintainers section to development process

[Peter Maydell]

On Fri, 14 Oct 2022 at 14:31, Alex Bennée <alex.bennee@linaro.org> wrote:
>
>
> Markus Armbruster <armbru@redhat.com> writes:
>
> > Mark Cave-Ayland <mark.cave-ayland@ilande.co.uk> writes:
> >
> >> On 12/10/2022 13:11, Alex Bennée wrote:
> >
> > [...]
> >
> >>> +Becoming a maintainer
> >>> +---------------------
> >>> +
> >>> +Maintainers are volunteers who put themselves forward to keep an eye
> >>> +on an area of code. They are generally accepted by the community to
> >
> > Do you mean "expected by the community"?
>
> Well I was trying to make clear how the "community" decides who should
> be a maintainer. We don't leave it to who's currently holding the merge
> keys so in practice its other contributors acknowledging that the
> proposed maintainer knows their stuff (or at least didn't step backwards
> fast enough when the call went out).

I think there are also two parts or stages to this:
 (1) is there somebody who's agreed to review patches, look at
     incoming bugs, etc for a particular bit of the code and
     is probably the 'local expert' on it?
 (2) who is accumulating these patches and eventually sending
     a pull request?

For a lot of the smaller sub-areas of QEMU (e.g. specific board
types or specific devices) these might be two different people.
And we might trust somebody to be able to do code review and
patch triage but prefer the patches to flow through the tree
of some other maintainer who's more experienced with sending
pull requests.

-- PMM