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Re: [commit] Mention VAX floating-point support in NEWS
> Date: Tue, 1 Nov 2005 14:59:55 -0800
> From: Joel Brobecker <brobecker@adacore.com>
> Cc: Mark Kettenis <mark.kettenis@xs4all.nl>,
> gdb-patches@sourceware.org
>
> In my very humble opinion, I think it will overall cost less energy
> if we let changes like this go in, and deal with the odd case where
> the change is not obvious after all. My reasoning is that these cases
> happen very seldomly as the global maintainers have demonstrated a good
> sense of judgement, and it's always easy to revert if we need to discuss
> this.
I'm sorry to say, but your reasoning flies in the face of our recent
experience. People (who will remain unnamed) were making
controversial changes to the repository, sometimes even over protests
of fellow maintainers. As experience would have it, reverting is an
option that is seldom if ever taken; perhaps the reason is that
unilateral reverts will just start a revert war, because the person
whose patches are reverted has write access and can re-commit the
reverted patches.
Even if things don't go this far, reverting a change is something
deemed too radical and harsh (and justly so, IMHO), so I don't think
we should rely on it as part of our procedures.
Anyway, I'm amazed that people are so quick in forgetting the bitter
lessons we all should have learned from such recent events.