Re: [maint] The GDB maintenance process

Joel Brobecker
2003-02-19T02:26:38Z

Daniel said:
> I want to share a piece of perspective on why I raise this issue now.
> I'm finding the GDB development process to be too slow to be workable -
> patches take a month or more routinely,

> Maybe that means that I just don't have the time and the patience to be
> a useful contributor to GDB. Me, I think that it means that we need to
> make the process less painful for contributors.

So far, I have only really started making some contributions maybe a
year and a half ago, and my level of involvment is very far from a lot
of the developpers I see on this list. But I tend to agree with Daniel
that patches _sometimes_ take a very long time to be included, and that
it is easy to be discouraged.

I think there are also a lot of patches floating around that are waiting
for at least a review. One of the ACT developpers actually stopped
submitting his patches, just because he did not receive any feedback.
And yet he spent the effort of creating a PR and attaching the patch to
this PR! So I am submitting the changes on his behalf now, and took on
the job of trying to push for these patches to be reviewed.

I agree that we are all very busy, and that it's natural that reviews
do not always happen in a timely manor. In fact, I am generally happy
with the delay-to-review, but my feeling is that the GDB community is
losing a lot of valuable work because it never gets looked at.

With my modest experience on the GDB project, and without any experience
on any other GNU project like this, it's difficult to make any
recommendation. My feeling is that we could try relaxing a bit the
rules, and allow global maintainers to approves changes if the
associated maintainer is unable to review them in say, a few (couple?)
of weeks.

Look at http://sources.redhat.com/ml/gdb-patches/2002-10/msg00586.html
for intance. This patch addresses a GDB crash, and the fix has been
sitting since Oct 30th, despite 2 pings, 1 recommendation for approval,
and a message to the maintainers. I do not want to blame the maintainers
here, but in my opinion the global maintainers should be able to act as
surrogates when they see that a patch has been sitting for more than a
certain duration, and they have the knowledge to review it.

--
Joel