This document discusses ways for people to engage with the Xen community, including through non-development activities like testing and documentation or development activities like contributing code. It encourages testing Xen releases on different hardware, writing thorough bug reports, improving documentation, providing feedback, and contributing patches with guidelines like breaking changes into logical patches and ensuring no regressions. Testing, documentation, feedback, and code contributions are described as ways to engage and help the community.

1. Engaging the Xen Community
Roger Pau Monné
XenDay Barcelona 2012

2. Engaging the Xen Community XenDay 2012
Why might people not be involved?
Cost not worth the benefits
Don’t know what there is to do
Don’t know how to engage community effectively
November 8th Barcelona

3. Engaging the Xen Community XenDay 2012
Outline
● Engaging in non-development activities
● Engaging in development
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4. Engaging the Xen Community XenDay 2012
How can you contribute?
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5. Engaging the Xen Community XenDay 2012
Testing
Need testing on a wide array of hardware/software
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Test the functionality you use
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Performance testing as well
What to test
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Xen release candidates
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Linux pvops release candidates
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Distro packages
Wiki: http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Xen_Test_Days
November 8th Barcelona

6. Engaging the Xen Community XenDay 2012
Good bug reports
What to include
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Detailed hardware, software, steps to reproduce
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As much error as you can
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Serial console output
Wiki page:
http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Reporting_Bugs_against_Xen
November 8th Barcelona

7. Engaging the Xen Community XenDay 2012
Documentation
User Documentation
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In-tree documentation
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Wiki
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HOWTOs
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Man pages
Developer documentation
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ABI
Wiki: http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Xen_Document_Days
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8. Engaging the Xen Community XenDay 2012
Feedback
Suggest changes / clarifications to interface
Suggest new features which might be useful to
you
Help us prioritize what features are important
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http://xenorg.uservoice.com
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9. Engaging the Xen Community XenDay 2012
Contributing code
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10. Engaging the Xen Community XenDay 2012
Xen contributions
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11. Engaging the Xen Community XenDay 2012
Guidelines
Break your change into a series of patches
One logical change per patch
No regressions
Don’t fix a bug in one patch in a later patch!
Separate clean-up from functional changes
Even if it’s just a one-line change
One-line summary easy to scan
Description says what the patch does and why
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12. Engaging the Xen Community XenDay 2012
Requirements
Patch must apply
Beware of mailer mangling
Mercurial PatchBomb extension
Stacked Git (stg)
Signed-off-by
Coding style
Wiki:
http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Submitting_Xen_Patches
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13. Engaging the Xen Community XenDay 2012
Three people to think about
Person reviewing the patch
Does it do the right thing?
Are there any mistakes?
Person scanning through changesets
Do I need to look at this patch?
Archaeologist
6 months, 1 year, 2 years, 5 years
Why is the code the way it is now?
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14. Engaging the Xen Community XenDay 2012
Questions?
November 8th Barcelona