Re: Maintainer policy for GDB

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Fri, 18 Nov 2005 11:50:40 -0800
> From: Joel Brobecker <brobecker@adacore.com>
> Cc: gdb@sourceware.org, cagney@gnu.org, jtc@acorntoolworks.com, 	fnf@ninemoons.com, Peter.Schauer@regent.e-technik.tu-muenchen.de, 	ezannoni@redhat.com
> 
> I won't argue much more about this

Neither will I.  As long as my opinion is understood, you are free to
do whatever you wish with it.

In the comments below, I will try to clarify my opinion without adding
any new arguments.

> It does seem however that one particular individual caused you to
> lose the trust you had in all the other maintainers

It wasn't a single individual.  And I didn't lose trust in all the
other maintainers as the result; if I somehow implied that, I'm sorry.

What I lost is the optimistic belief in our ability to resolve such
situations based on good will.

> Otherwise, why would you insist on adding an overhead that
> essentially allows us to restrain a maintainer.

I didn't insist, but I thought (and still think) that some
self-imposed restraint will do us good.

> 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.

I have on my memory examples of my comments and requests being
disregarded or met with silence.  So being able to comment (this is a
public list, after all!) is not sufficient.

> Hopefully you understood my arguments and the group is able to make
> the decision that will benefit the project the most.

Actually, it is unclear to me how we will make the decision here.  Do
we vote? do we go to the SC and ask them to pass judgement?

> 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).

I responded to this elsewhere in this thread.