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Submitting Patches to Xen.org Community

By September 16, 2009March 7th, 2019Announcements

The Xen.org community has published an updated Wiki page with all you need to know about creating and submitting patches:
http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/SubmittingXenPatches
Also, there has been some discussion in xen-devel lately about some patches not being commented on or accepted by the tree maintainer. Here are some thoughts form George Dunlap that clarify the issue:
I believe the accepted protocol is to re-send the patch after 2-4 weeks, with a comment to the effect that you didn’t get a response last time; perhaps with the [RESEND] in the subject line, to alert people that the last mail was dropped?
Obviously it would be nice if everyone got a comment the first time, but that’s not always possible.  This method may seem a little less friendly, but in fact it has several positive attributes:
* It distributes the responsibility of keeping track of patches, rather than having a centralized location
* It naturally filters out low-interest patches.  If neither the submitter nor others on the list find it interesting, they naturally get dropped instead of piling up in a queue somewhere; whereas, if the submitter considers it interesting and important, he will persist until he gets a response.

The main difficulty is letting new people know the policy: don’t take it hard if you don’t get a response, just re-send after a few weeks.
In an effort to promote the policy, I am promoting the Wiki page as well as adding this blog post. If you have any questions on this policy, please contact me directly at stephen.spector@xen.org.