Re: [MAINT/RFC] Start devolving maintenance responsibility

[Andrew Cagney <ac131313 at cygnus dot com>]

Jim Kingdon wrote:

[A response, I sometimes think this is being proposed in a vacume. 
Thanks!]

> > Individuals who make changes to the debugger need approval from all
> > relevant domain maintainers before those changed can be checked in.

> Are you saying that making a change across a large number of files
> requires a dozen or so people to sign off on it?  While I (probably)
> don't have a problem with that when something substantive and
> pervasive is being redesigned, it seems like it would be a mistake to
> take that attitude with respect to stylistic changes and cleaning up
> lint and the like.  And I'm thinking that people with blanket write
> privs should be capable of figuring out which is which (or else they
> wouldn't have blanket write privs).

Some how, I'd expect common sense to prevail.

With a stylistic change (ISO-C'ism, -W...), I would not expect it to be
attempted in a single hit.
I'd instead expect:

	o	basic consensus by the maintainers
		on the move

	o	individuals (blanket maintainers or
		other) to _incrementally_ work
		through the sources.  At each stage
		a heads up before hand so that the
		group knows whats about to hit them :-)

As an asside, I think I've so far used so called blanket check-ins privs
to:

	o	<wait.h> -> "gdb_wait.h"

	o	fixing a #include in arm-tdep.c

the first was agreed on months ago and the second was so small to be in
the noise.

> I guess part of what I'm getting at is that I don't want to go down
> the dead end we did with CVS, in which we (well, I, although I had at
> least the acquiescence of others) tried to write up a lot of formal
> policies and procedures and such.  Instead, the key is a set of
> maintainers who respect each other's expertise and willingness to work
> together.  Some basic level of rules/guidelines is helpful, but I
> wonder whether concepts and words like "devolve", "maintenance
> domain", and "responsibility" are going too far.

Sorry, devolve, as a word, is probably more meaningful to people from
Commonwealth countries.

> Or (to ask another way), what is the problem with the status quo?  If
> it is that the paragraph about first and second maintainers goes too
> far in telling first maintainers how to relate to their second
> maintainers, let's fuzz it up rather than trying to spell things out
> more.

Perhaphs that can be done that way.  The wording was probably lousy.

The underlying concern I have isn't with people like you that have been
hacking on open code for years, its with people familar with GDB but not
so familar with open source.  For that reason, I think it is useful to
spell out, in basic terms, how the system should work.

	thanks,
		Andrew