Re: Maintainer policy for GDB

Joel Brobecker
2005-11-18T19:50:46Z

Eli,

I understand your position, and the rationale behind it. I still
think that the addition of rules as you suggest will be causing
extra work and delays. I won't argue much more about this, since
the overhead will hopefully be small. This remains to be verified.

It does seem however that one particular individual caused you to
lose the trust you had in all the other maintainers, and that is
very unfortunate. Otherwise, why would you insist on adding an
overhead that essentially allows us to restrain a maintainer.
Giving your trust, and letting them commit without approval does
not prevent monitoring of your peers' work, nor does it prevent
you from commenting and helping improve his work.

The situation in GDB has, in my opinion, changed a great deal in
the past year. For one thing, the SC committee is now more organized,
and able to make decisions. My opinion is that we should avoid
going to the SC if we can deal ourselves with a situation. This
is what I mean by "reduce the use of the SC as much as possible".
However, we should not hesitate to go to them should we need to.
That's what they are here for.

I prefer not to draw any parallel between society (laws) and our group
(rules). Our group (the group of maintainers) is by invitation only. One
has to demonstrate that one is able to work cooperatively with the rest
of the maintainers before he gets nominated. I still deeply belive that
all of us are good natured and willing to listen to the others, just as
much as I'm trying to listen to you. I believe that abusive behavior
will not happen overnight, and that the threat of losing one's
priviledges by SC decision will be enough to prevent abuse repeats.
Cf the GCC maintainer story I told in my previous message.

I listened to your arguments, I understand where they come from. But
I think you are asking for unnecessary measures. I've exposed my
arguments as best as I could. Hopefully you understood my arguments
and the group is able to make the decision that will benefit the project
the most.

Also, it just occurred to me that this discussion is only a small part
of the overal discussion. The rest of the discussion seemed much more
important to me: The distinction between reponsibility (who promised
to review), and the authority (who has the priviledge).

--
Joel