Re: [commit] Add add_setshow_enum_cmd, use in mips

["Eli Zaretskii" <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Mon, 8 Nov 2004 20:14:58 -0500
> From: Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@false.org>
> Cc: cagney@gnu.org, gdb-patches@sources.redhat.com
> 
> But self-review seems like a
> reasonable practice to me and my experience reading gdb-patches shows
> it to be a pretty common one.  Most patches are self-approved.  Some
> maintainers tend to post patches to areas without specific maintainers
> as RFA's; others don't.

I think self-approved patches are only appropriate when the person who
submits them is an expert in the area of the patch.

> The other thing experience tells me is that patches posted as an RFA,
> by someone who could self-approve it, only very rarely get reviewed.
> Often they sit for ages.

We could have some rule that, when there's no specific maintainer for
an area, a patch posted as an RFA could go in if unreviewed for some
time.

> If there is no expert in the area, who will know more about the code
> than the global maintainers generally, why ask for review?

The fact that there's no appointed area maintainer does not mean that
there are no people who know about the related code.  It could just
mean that no maintainer feels he/she can always be responsive enough
to step forward and suggest themselves as area maintainers for that
area.

> I assume that all of the active maintainers can handle coding
> style, and general "is this a gross hack" checks, on their own.

Matters of design are always best handled by peer reviews, in my
experience.  Something that isn't a gross hack can still be not the
best design.