Re: [Xen-devel] X86 Community Call: Wed March 14, 15:00 - 16:00 UTC - Minutes

[George Dunlap <George.Dunlap@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> On Mar 15, 2018, at 8:31 AM, Jan Beulich <JBeulich@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
>>>> On 14.03.18 at 19:06, <lars.kurth@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> # General Items: RFCs
>> 
>> Jan: Generally reviewers prioritize RFCs lower than other non-RFC patch 
>> series.
> 
> Just to clarify - this was not "reviewers" but "I". I can't speak for
> others.

Well this is different than the messaging I (and I think Lars) have been giving 
to people, so we’d probably better get our story straight. :-)

To me, the idea of an RFC is to get early feedback on the design / basic idea 
of something before a lot of effort is invested into it.  We’ve all seen this 
problem where someone’s invested a long time testing and “perfecting” a series 
using one approach, only to have to throw the whole thing away because the 
community didn’t really care for that approach.  It makes everyone unhappy: The 
submitter because he wasted time, the reviewer because he has to argue with 
someone who has an emotional attachment to his approach.   RFCs can reduce 
that, by allowing people to talk about a “sketch”, before the thing takes final 
form.  RFCs may often be text, but sometimes code — even early mock-ups of code 
-- is the clearest and most concise way to communicate something.

(If people think we should be operating on different principles, then we should 
stop here to discuss it, since the following paragraph flows naturally from the 
understanding in the previous paragraph.)

Since that’s what I think about the purpose of RFCs, it seems to me that 
reviewing RFCs (if they’re reasonably small) should in general get at least 
equal priority, if not higher, because 1) reviewing design-only is much faster 
than nitpicking all the code style changes or FIXMEs 2) reviewing ideas and 
designs early should save *everyone* — both the submitter and you — time and 
effort.

Obviously any 41-patch series is going to take some time to get your head 
around, and so it makes sense to schedule that for a time when you have a few 
hours to set aside and nothing urgent.  But in any case you don’t need to do a 
detailed review, just give feedback on the overall approach.  

And of course, even this kind of “general feedback” is something which we need 
to try to spread among more people than just you & Andy, so I don’t think *you 
personally* should feel the need to review every single RFC; but in general we 
as a community should try to make sure that RFCs get reasonable turn-around 
time from someone.  Hopefully something like the x86 community call will help 
us coordinate that.

 -George
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