on the irresponsibility of pursuing C language reform

[Joseph Myers]

On Sat, 1 Aug 2026, Alejandro Colomar wrote:

> It's certainly a privileged position.  Just like maintainer of GCC, or
> of Clang, or any other core project of most systems.  I acknowledge
> this, and I believe I've acknowledged this before, implicitly and
> explicitly.

Subsystem maintainers in glibc may choose to assume consensus for their 
own changes in that subsystem *in the absence of evidence to the 
contrary*.  If it becomes clear that in fact there is not consensus for 
such a change, they still need to revert it and go through the community 
process to figure out what has consensus instead (or if the community is 
unable to reach consensus, go to a vote of the GNU maintainers for glibc, 
but such a vote should be very rare); being a subsystem maintainer is just 
a shortcut and a signal of recognized expertise in that subsystem, not a 
mechanism to override consensus.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
josmyers@redhat.com