From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 3928 invoked by alias); 25 Mar 2004 06:11:34 -0000 Mailing-List: contact gdb-patches-help@sources.redhat.com; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: gdb-patches-owner@sources.redhat.com Received: (qmail 3921 invoked from network); 25 Mar 2004 06:11:33 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO yosemite.airs.com) (209.128.65.135) by sources.redhat.com with SMTP; 25 Mar 2004 06:11:33 -0000 Received: (qmail 9407 invoked by uid 10); 25 Mar 2004 06:11:32 -0000 Received: (qmail 4486 invoked by uid 500); 25 Mar 2004 06:11:23 -0000 To: Joel Brobecker Cc: Robert Dewar , gdbheads@gnu.org, gdb-patches@sources.redhat.com Subject: Re: [Gdbheads] A small patch case study, -file-list-exec-source-files References: <20040225040059.GB19094@white> <16456.65451.461753.66554@localhost.redhat.com> <20040306155700.GA9439@white> <20040311132508.GA2504@white> <20040323130900.GA17339@white> <40605C9F.2050700@gnat.com> <20040325043648.GA20454@white> <20040325055925.GS1104@gnat.com> From: Ian Lance Taylor Date: Thu, 25 Mar 2004 06:11:00 -0000 In-Reply-To: <20040325055925.GS1104@gnat.com> Message-ID: User-Agent: Gnus/5.09 (Gnus v5.9.0) Emacs/21.3 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-SW-Source: 2004-03/txt/msg00593.txt.bz2 Joel Brobecker writes: > GDB is a volunteer work! I want to note that this is only partially true. In fact there are a number of people who are paid to work on gdb. It's not clear whether anybody is paid specifically to maintain gdb. When I was at Cygnus I was paid to maintain the GNU binutils, though that was certainly not my only job. I don't know whether Red Hat has carried that sort of thing forward. > If you keep insisting that a maintainer have to review patches within a > given timeframe and that they should step down if they can't, then I > think we're going to lose a lot of maintainers. Will GDB really be > better off? I think not. I would say that the issue is how to best keep gdb moving forward. On the one hand, if we require prompt patch review, then gdb may lose maintainers. On the other hand, if patches are not reviewed promptly, then gdb may lost contributors. There is a balance between the two. The goal is to keep the balance from tipping too far to one side or the other. I don't know myself whether the balance is indeed tipped too far for gdb. As I've said, I do think that maintainers should treat patch review as their most important activity. > I think you're looking at the wrong solution. The real solution, > according to me, is not to push away good maintainers that have only so > much time, but to help the group of maintainers to act as a team. > When one maintainer is too busy, then the rest of the team should be > allowed to step up and help the busy maintainer by reviewing patches > and answering emails in his place. The real problem is that GDB > currently has bottlenecks, and that's the issue that needs solving, > one way or the other. Yes, this sort of approach has been proposed by several different people, including some gdb maintainers. Ian