Re: Stepping down from several maintainership roles

[David Carlton <carlton@math.stanford.edu>]

On 18 Mar 2003 14:16:52 -0500, fche@redhat.com (Frank Ch. Eigler) said:
> fnasser wrote:

>> My new responsibilities in my job and the project I am working on
>> are not allowing me to be responsive to the list requests. This
>> will remain like that until the end of the Summer.  [...]  So I am
>> stepping down from several maintainership roles.  [...]

> This is too bad.  It appears that in order to solve the problem of
> insufficient time availability of maintainers, several of them have
> been nagged in order to get them to resign.  These people having
> history and experience have been pressured into severing ties
> outright, making it likely that they spend even less time on gdb.
> How is this supposed to be progress?

That was my reaction, too.  On the other hand, on a purely pragrmatic
level, going from having 1 maintainer in an area to having 0
maintainers in that area can be progress because it means that, all of
a sudden, any global maintainer can approve a patch in that area.  And
removing maintainers from areas that, in practice, they'll never
approve patches for, doesn't hurt anything, though I don't see why it
helps anything either unless those maintainers no longer consider
themselves competent to approve patches in those areas.

Still, as I've said before, I would far prefer a solution that
increases the number of local maintainers: I do not believe that all
people competent to be local maintainers in various areas are, in
fact, currently local maintainers, and I do believe that the current
standard for becoming a local maintainer is too high.

David Carlton
carlton@math.stanford.edu