Re: Maintainer policy for GDB

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Fri, 25 Nov 2005 11:04:54 -0500
> From: Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@false.org>
> 
> You see, I was thinking a couple of days, or up to a week.

Two days is awfully too few, IMO.  I could think of many reasons why I
could be away of my mail for two days.  Not everyone hacks GCC and GDB
for their living and have an opportunity to read gdb-patches during
office hours.

> Do you want to be the one to explain to all the latter group "no,
> sorry, we can't look at your patch for three weeks"?

I think there's a misunderstanding: 3 weeks was suggested as a
_timeout_, i.e. an extreme value beyond which we behave as if the
responsible maintainer were not there.  It is not suggested as the
_average_ value.  If, several months from now, we see that the average
delay is anywhere near 3 weeks, I will be the first one to suggest we
do something about it.

> I've done the "no, sorry, we need so-and-so to look at this" routine
> a fair number of times in the past year, and it's no fun.

I think in most, if not all, of those cases, the delay was much longer
than 3 weeks.

> With just a week, it's easy to give the contributor feedback on the
> style et cetera - which often takes a week anyway - while waiting
> for comments from the responsible party.

That's another misunderstanding: there's no need for the other
maintainers to wait before they post comments about the proposed
patches, not even for a minute.  They could do that right away.  One
needs to wait only for the approval.  Any other comments, style or
otherwise, need not wait.

In other words, the timeout is not a silence period during which no
one can say anything about the proposed patch.  It's the max time we
give the responsible maintainer to review the patch and make up her
mind whether to approve it.

> But alternatively, we could use a long timeout and an aggressive
> policy for maintainers who time out repeatedly - politely remove
> them from responsibility (shift into the authorized section).  How
> do you feel about that?

Responsible maintainers that time out repeatedly should be asked to
do better or to step down.