Stepping down from several maintainership roles

Stepping down from several maintainership roles

[Fernando Nasser]

Hi folks,

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.  The situation aggravated when I 
got sick and then had to rebuild my home system almost from scratch.

So I am stepping down from several maintainership roles.
I checked the changes to MAINTAINERS as obvious.

I've marked some as "vacant" but the overall testsuite and
command interpreter roles were devolved to the "Global Maintainers"
as suggested by Andrew Cagney.

Regards to all.

-- 
Fernando Nasser
Red Hat Canada Ltd.                     E-Mail:  fnasser@redhat.com
2323 Yonge Street, Suite #300
Toronto, Ontario   M4P 2C9

Re: Stepping down from several maintainership roles

[Frank Ch. Eigler]

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?

- FChE

Re: Stepping down from several maintainership roles

[David Carlton]

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

Re: Stepping down from several maintainership roles

[Andrew Cagney]

David,

An inactive maintainer, at some point, be it 6 months, or even two years 
of inactivity, needs recognize that they are no longer participating in 
GDB's day-to-day development and as such should probably step back from 
their maintenance roles.  If doing this means that the role becomes 
vacant then that is a good thing.  This is because having no maintainer 
removes any possible perception that the code is, in even the smallest 
way, being developed or maintained (c.f., java).

With this in mind I'll, from time to time, ping GDB maintainers and ask 
them to review their current level of commitment to both GDB and the 
FSF, and consider droping an area of maintenance responsibility. 
Overall, I receive a very positive response to such requests.  I 
personally appreciate such a level of professionalism, simply 
acknowledging this can be both difficult and painful.

No one has been `pressured into severing ties outright'.

Andrew