Comment 6 for bug 1075252

Revision history for this message
Stefan Hajnoczi (stefanha) wrote : Re: [Qemu-devel] [Bug 1075252] Re: qemu-img cannot read VMDK4 file

On Tue, Dec 4, 2012 at 2:56 AM, Robert Hubbard <email address hidden> wrote:
> I have uploaded a patch - I am failing miserably to get any output from git
> patch!!!!!! ... :^( . the code is structured to addres the fact that
> convert will not work today, needs lots of work to do this. This would be
> next effort.

Hi Rob,
git-patch(1) is used to apply patches - it's not the command for
producing patch emails.

Try git-format-patch(1). Here is a short post I found on creating a
commit and using git-format-patch(1):

http://andrewprice.me.uk/weblog/entry/generating-patch-emails-with-git

There are several git tutorials that cover much more and will help you
get familiar. If you want to learn git I recommend:

http://git-scm.com/book
http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~blynn/gitmagic/

But remember you don't need to use git - some people use other tools
or simply diff(1). You just need to send patches to the mailing list
as described at http://wiki.qemu.org/Contribute/SubmitAPatch.

If you have doubts about how to structure a patch series, try peeking
at what other people have sent to the mailing list.

I took a quick look at the patch you uploaded:

It helps review to split changes up into multiple patches, one patch
for each logical code change. For example, renaming a struct field
also involves changing code that uses the field because the name has
changed. This is a good candidate for a patch - just the struct field
rename and updates to code that uses the old name. If you think at
this level of code change your diff can be split into several
independent changes which are easier to review.

That said, renaming fields or changing whitespace should only be done
when necessary. It introduces noise in the form of extra work to
review - the compiled object code probably doesn't change and the
behavior of the program won't either. So it's best to only make
changes that are necessary or that provide clear value. (I'm not an
expert on block/vmdk.c, for example, so any non-essential changes
basically mean extra work for me to check whether they are okay or
not.)

Going back to the original bug: can you confirm that qemu.git/master
qemu-img correctly displays the VMDK file you have? Fam Zheng
indicated the bug you originally hit has already been fixed.

Please send patches or questions for new VMDK changes that are
unrelated to this bug report directly to qemu-devel. Your patch seems
to be beyond the scope of this bug report and adds some additional
qemu-img info output.

Hope this helps. If you want real-time discussion, try asking on
#qemu on irc.oftc.net where a lot of QEMU developers hang out.

Stefan