doc: add details on requirements for patch ack and merge

Add to the contributors guide the requirements and guidelines for
getting patches acked and merged. It details at what point the review
comments and the ack's need to be received in order to have a given
patch merged into a release.

These guidelines are as agreed by the DPDK technical board at the
meeting held on 2017-02-15.

Signed-off-by: Bruce Richardson <bruce.richardson@intel.com>
Acked-by: Thomas Monjalon <thomas.monjalon@6wind.com>
Acked-by: John McNamara <john.mcnamara@intel.com>

diff --git a/doc/guides/contributing/patches.rst b/doc/guides/contributing/patches.rst
index 4fe9025..fe71381 100644 (file)
--- a/doc/guides/contributing/patches.rst
+++ b/doc/guides/contributing/patches.rst
@@ -504,4 +504,20 @@ patch accepted. The general cycle for patch review and acceptance is:
 #. In addition a patch will not be accepted if it doesn't address comments from a previous version with fixes or
    valid arguments.
 
-#. Acked patches will be merged in the current or next merge window.
+#. It is the responsibility of a maintainer to ensure that patches are reviewed and to provide an ``ack`` or
+   ``nack`` of those patches as appropriate.
+
+#. Once a patch has been acked by the relevant maintainer, reviewers may still comment on it for a further
+   two weeks. After that time, the patch should be merged into the relevant git tree for the next release.
+   Additional notes and restrictions:
+
+   * Patches should be acked by a maintainer at least two days before the release merge
+     deadline, in order to make that release.
+   * For patches acked with less than two weeks to go to the merge deadline, all additional
+     comments should be made no later than two days before the merge deadline.
+   * After the appropriate time for additional feedback has passed, if the patch has not yet
+     been merged to the relevant tree by the committer, it should be treated as though it had,
+     in that any additional changes needed to it must be addressed by a follow-on patch, rather
+     than rework of the original.
+   * Trivial patches may be merged sooner than described above at the tree committer's
+     discretion.