Re: Maintainer policy for GDB

[Christopher Faylor <me@cgf.cx>]

On Sat, Nov 26, 2005 at 08:30:11PM -0800, Michael Snyder wrote:
>I sincerely hope to forward the discussion toward, rather than
>away from convergence.  These are casual suggestions; if anyone
>thinks they're too daft, I'll happily withdraw them.
>
>1) Unique approval authority.
>
>How about this -- if there's to be a specific maintainer with
>sole approval authority for certain areas, there'll have to be
>a list of them somewhere: presumably in the MAINTAINERS file
>or equivalent.
>
>What if each such area maintainer has the right to spell out
>his or her own policy as far as "timeouts", etc.?  Rather than
>forcing a one-size-fits-all policy?  Eg.:
>
>    Area Maintainers:
>	gdb/doc: Eli Zaretskii.
>	    Checkin policy: "I prefer that any changes other
>	    than obvious fixes await my explicit approval for
>	    at least 3 weeks".
>	mumble mumble: Daniel Jacobowitz
>	    Checkin policy: "If I haven't responded within
>	    3-5 days, any global maintainer may approve."

I don't like this much.  I'd rather that there was just one rule that we
could all (as Daniel says) reluctantly agree on.  I think it will be
pretty confusing to contributors otherwise.

"Yes, I can apply your changes to inflow.c but I can't apply your
changes to win32-nat.c since cgf is unavailable and his rules dictate
that I can't apply your patch since you submitted it on the third Friday
of a month with an 'r' in it."

Not to keep bringing this up, but this reminds me of the "please Cc me
when you send email to the mailing list" requirements.  If you have to
take extra effort to figure out how to do a common operation the you are
putting impediments in the flow of communication.  I don't think that's
ever a good thing.

cgf