[Qemu-devel] ipxe for qemu maintainance

[Qemu-devel] ipxe for qemu maintainance

[Gerd Hoffmann]

  Hi folks,

I'd like to start maintaining qemu-specific branches in our ipxe.git
repo.  The reason for this are some problems with the upstream ipxe
maintainance:

 * The ipxe maintainer apparently is pretty busy.  Often (but not
   always) it takes weeks or even months to get patches merged upstream,
   which is bad in case we need a fix included quickly due to freeze
   deadline approaching ...
 * There is no release management whatsoever.  No stable branches,
   no release tags.  Picking up a fix upstream means rebasing to
   a snapshot which includes the fix.

So I'd like to improve that downstream with qemu branches, where we can
commit not-yet merged patches, revert broken patches and cherry-pick
bugfixes.

This is *NOT* meant to be a replacement for working with upstream to get
patches merged and bugs fixed.  But it will allow us to handle things in
a timely manner without having to depend on the upstream maintainer.
And we can be more selective about the ipxe patches we accept during
freeze.

I plan to also add qemu release tags to the repo, so you can easily
figure what is included in each qemu release.

Laszlo created a wiki page for this, naming conventions for branches and
tags are listed there too:
        http://wiki.qemu-project.org/IpxeDownstreamForQemu

Comments?

cheers,
  Gerd

PS: v2, this time with the correct qemu-devel address ...

Re: [Qemu-devel] ipxe for qemu maintainance

[Jeff Cody]

On Wed, Feb 22, 2017 at 02:42:34PM +0100, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
>   Hi folks,
> 
> I'd like to start maintaining qemu-specific branches in our ipxe.git
> repo.  The reason for this are some problems with the upstream ipxe
> maintainance:
> 
>  * The ipxe maintainer apparently is pretty busy.  Often (but not
>    always) it takes weeks or even months to get patches merged upstream,
>    which is bad in case we need a fix included quickly due to freeze
>    deadline approaching ...
>  * There is no release management whatsoever.  No stable branches,
>    no release tags.  Picking up a fix upstream means rebasing to
>    a snapshot which includes the fix.
> 
> So I'd like to improve that downstream with qemu branches, where we can
> commit not-yet merged patches, revert broken patches and cherry-pick
> bugfixes.
> 
> This is *NOT* meant to be a replacement for working with upstream to get
> patches merged and bugs fixed.  But it will allow us to handle things in
> a timely manner without having to depend on the upstream maintainer.
> And we can be more selective about the ipxe patches we accept during
> freeze.
> 
> I plan to also add qemu release tags to the repo, so you can easily
> figure what is included in each qemu release.
> 
> Laszlo created a wiki page for this, naming conventions for branches and
> tags are listed there too:
>         http://wiki.qemu-project.org/IpxeDownstreamForQemu
> 
> Comments?
>

It looks like there were no objections, so I've gone ahead and put you and
Ladi Prosek in the ipxe.git committers.   Let me know if you have any
issues.

Thanks,
Jeff