From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 21416 invoked by alias); 19 Feb 2003 22:24:22 -0000 Mailing-List: contact gdb-help@sources.redhat.com; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: gdb-owner@sources.redhat.com Received: (qmail 21409 invoked from network); 19 Feb 2003 22:24:21 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO zenia.red-bean.com) (66.244.67.22) by 172.16.49.205 with SMTP; 19 Feb 2003 22:24:21 -0000 Received: from zenia.red-bean.com (localhost.localdomain [127.0.0.1]) by zenia.red-bean.com (8.12.5/8.12.5) with ESMTP id h1JMHl8A030055; Wed, 19 Feb 2003 17:17:47 -0500 Received: (from jimb@localhost) by zenia.red-bean.com (8.12.5/8.12.5/Submit) id h1JMHkAZ030051; Wed, 19 Feb 2003 17:17:46 -0500 To: Andrew Cagney Cc: gdb@sources.redhat.com Subject: Re: [maint] The GDB maintenance process References: <20030217180709.GA19866@nevyn.them.org> <3E53B2E0.2070801@redhat.com> From: Jim Blandy Date: Wed, 19 Feb 2003 22:24:00 -0000 In-Reply-To: <3E53B2E0.2070801@redhat.com> Message-ID: User-Agent: Gnus/5.09 (Gnus v5.9.0) Emacs/21.3 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-SW-Source: 2003-02/txt/msg00381.txt.bz2 Andrew Cagney writes: > > - It's true that "... some maintainers should try to review patches in > > their areas of responsibility more often", but merely saying so > > doesn't have any effect. > > For the record your name is top of the list of that `some maintainers'. If you like. I pick on myself often enough elsewhere in that message that it should be clear I'm not trying to make others feel bad for shortcomings I have myself. In fact, this is exactly what we need to put behind us: we can spend another few years feeling bad for being insufficiently responsive, and treating it as a personal failure. But that approach hasn't improved things noticeably, so, is there something else we can do? Given the people we have, the community we have, and their known strengths and weaknesses, what is the best way to organize them? Can we improve on what we're doing now? I think the explicit hierarchy we have now, outlined in MAINTAINERS, is a real problem in this sense. It's a big, public, political deal to rearrange that hierarchy. There are other systems where the processes of promoting promising contributors and clearing dead wood happen smoothly and automatically, without confrontation. People contribute as they are able, and leaders emerge and recede in a natural way, not by fiat. The Apache system, for example, encourages newcomers to acquire expertise in different areas, and allows less responsive people to simply fall to the wayside as irrelevant. These systems are in widespread use, and I think some are even well-documented, like: http://httpd.apache.org/dev/guidelines.html