Re: Maintainer policy for GDB

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Cc: David Carlton <David.Carlton@sun.com>
> From: David Carlton <david.carlton@sun.com>
> Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2005 12:40:59 -0800
> 
> > In other words (and sorry for over-simplification), you ask me to
> > assume that everybody else is nice and reasonable, and that, more
> > often than not, I will succeed in talking them into accepting my
> > opinions.
> 
> I think you will on the matter of documentation, yes.  I'm not so sure
> about djgpp - there, I suspect people will still listen to you, but
> there's probably more scope for reasonable people to disagree.

Documentation was just an example, let's not read too much into it.
What I really meant is code, since we are all programmers and thus
care much more about code than about docs.

> My first answer is "you could be wrong about whether a patch is a good
> one or not".  Personally, I would (strongly) prefer not to adopt a
> conflict resolution mechanism where we designate certain people as
> always winning arguments about specific areas of GDB.

If we designate people who deserve that, why not?  Are you saying that
you dislike or don't believe in leadership as a matter of principle?

> So I'm pretty leery about generalizing from that example.  (Which is,
> admittedly, unfair of me, given that I started this subthread exactly
> by asking you to talk more about that example!)

Well, right: we must generalize it, otherwise every example will not
teach us anything about the general issue.

> I have two different responses to this.
> 
> 1) We could go along with that, and not ask anybody to take
>    responsibility: we could have a notion of authorized committer
>    without any notion of responsible committer.  That wouldn't bother
>    me at all; the proposal seems slightly too complex for me as-is, so
>    I wouldn't mind simplifying it in that way.
> 
> 2) It's not obvious to me that asking people to be responsible is
>    unfair.  And, as long as people have the right to say "no, I don't
>    want to be responsible" and remain authorized to commit patches,
>    it's also not obvious to me that it's urgent for us to figure out
>    whether or not it's fair.  Why not leave it up to people to decide
>    if they want to take responsibility without being given any
>    additional authority in return?

These both boil down to not having anyone responsible.  I don't think
we should go as far as that.