Re: job of maintainer?

[Nick Clifton <nickc at redhat dot com>]

Hi Jesse,

> 1. Every time the Binutils upgrading to a higher
> version, must the maintainer make sure that their
> target continues to work?  

Actually we hope that maintainers will continually make sure that their 
target works, even in between official releases.  ie we hope that 
maintainers will be active participants in the binutils project.

This is not a requirement however.  We understand that maintainers have 
commitments outside of binutils.  If a target stops working, and we 
notice it or if users complain about it on the mailing list, then we 
will try to contact the maintainers and ask them to fix it.  If they do 
not respond we may try to fix it ourselves or else decide that the 
target has been abandoned and scheduled it for obsolescence.

Note however that when someone makes a generic change in the binutils 
sources which requires modification to lots of target specific files, 
part of their job is making sure that they do not break any target. 
Thus a target maintainer usually does not have to do a lot of work in 
order to keep their target functioning.  The majority of a target 
maintainers work is actually fixing bugs and adding new features (if 
they want to).

> if so, then the maintainers will frequently do the job due to version 
> upgrading?

Binutils versions are only released once or twice a year, so it is not a 
frequent task.

Cheers
  Nick