Re: Maintainer policy for GDB

[Daniel Jacobowitz <drow at false dot org>]

On Fri, Nov 18, 2005 at 11:40:40PM +0200, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > Date: Fri, 18 Nov 2005 13:51:35 -0500
> > From: Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@false.org>
> > Cc: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>, gdb@sourceware.org
> > 
> > Eli, if this helps, here's another sort of example: someone who has
> > done a lot of work in an area, and who we trust to make changes to that
> > area without review, might be listed as "authorized to commit".  But
> > that person may either be uninterested in reviewing other people's
> > changes (unfortunate; I'm not sure how I'd feel about this case in
> > practice), not very good at reviewing other people's changes, or simply
> > always too busy to review other people's changes.  So listing them as
> > the responsible maintainer would do a disservice to the rest of the
> > community.
> 
> I'm worried that people might not want to take the responsibility upon
> them if others, who don't share the responsibility, are allowed to
> commit changes nonetheless.
> 
> In other words, if responsibility doesn't come with some unique
> authority, who will want such a responsibility?

I hope:
  - People who want to help improve the quality of GDB by adding
    long-term consistency to some area.
  - People who feel personally involved in some particular area of GDB
    development, probably because of large contributions to it.

It may not have its own authority, but it does have a certain amount of
face-recognition value, too.  Anyway, I don't want to write an essay on
free software motivations here :-)

Here's the counter question: if we force people to take the
responsibility, why will they do a good job?  Today's example is
convincing to me: they won't.  Let the people who want to do it
take responsibility voluntarily.

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz
CodeSourcery, LLC