Re: Maintainer policy for GDB

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz at gnu dot org>]

> Date: Sun, 20 Nov 2005 23:52:11 -0800
> From: Jim Blandy <jimb@red-bean.com>
> Cc: gdb@sourceware.org
> 
> On 11/19/05, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
> > > From: Jim Blandy <jimb@red-bean.com>
> > > But I don't think it's a good idea to grant exclusive authority as a
> > > reward for accepting responsibility.  I think contributors should earn
> > > authority informally, through their contributions and their
> > > participation in discussions.  If you work steadily, explain yourself
> > > well, and are easy to work with, then your words will carry weight
> > > that no set of rules could give them.  That is the sort of "position"
> > > that we should offer our contributors to aspire to.
> >
> > Then why not give them the responsibility at the same time as we grant
> > the authority, and through the same informal process?  Under the
> > proposed rules, nothing is lost by not having responsible maintainers,
> > anyway.
> 
> I don't understand this.  Could you spell it out for me, as you would
> for a young child?

Sorry for my continuing inability to explain myself.  Let me try
again.

You agreed that it was unfair to give someone a responsibility without
giving them the ``power to carry it out'' (which I interpret as
authority).

Then you said (above) that authority shouldn't be given merely as a
reward for accepting responsibility, but rather earned through gradual
informal process.

To that I say, let's wait until this informal process earns the
contributor the authority, and nominate her to be a responsible
maintainer only when that happens.  This could delay the nomination
considerably, or even leave us with a very small number of responsible
maintainers, but the proposed scheme works the same even in that case,
since patch commits don't require an approval from a responsible
maintainer, others have that power.

Does this make sense now?