GDB's roles

[Andrew Cagney <ac131313 at redhat dot com>]

Ignoring the upper levels, I think the people listed in the gdb 
MAINTAINERS file find themselves filling one or more of the following roles:


Elders:

These are the keepers of the `GDB wisdom'.  They are largely uninvolved 
in day to day GDB development - very hands off - very much don't given 
opinions except where to point out problems and flaws.


Adminstrator:

They do the day to day stuff: bug report unreviewed patches, ping 
maintainers that are asleep at the wheel, try to keep the political 
(RMS, et.al.) separate from the technical (this groups focus), web 
pages, ...


Architect:

Ensure that GDB is `heading in the right direction'.  The actual 
direction is determined by the group but this person gets to watch for 
things going off the rails.  Also, very occasionally, make architectural 
judgment calls.

The architect is woried about key interfaces such as the architecture 
and target vectors.


Core Maintainers:

These are the people on which everyone else depends.  They put 
themselves to the grindstone ensuring that the GDB wheel keeps turning. 
 These are the people that do the hard work of reviewing / approving 
patches.  These people need to be relatively reliable.  These people 
need to be willing to do the dirty work (such as restructuring) that 
can't reasonably be expected of a contributor.

While a core maintainer might also be responsible for certain specific 
areas (symtab, threads, remote), they won't cherry pick the patch list 
and definitly won't fall asleep at the wheel.


Specific Maintainers:

These are responsible for specific areas.  Native, target, host and 
language maintainers come to mind.  Their responsabilities are pretty 
clear, while needing to be responsive, they are not on the critical path 
like core maintainers.  The thing I really like about the target 
maintainers is how they, every so often, pop up to do some maintenance 
(eliminate something deprecated), and then pop back down again.


Developers/Contributors:

These are the people that have `fun'.  They have the luxury of poping 
up, contributing a new feature, and then simply disappearing again 
(typically though, a contributor ends up being the maintainer).  New 
development, of course, needs peer review (by a maintainer) as, in the 
long run, it will be the [core] maintainers that have to support that code.


Using the above as a reference (the last thing this list needs is a long 
irrelevant discussion about the semantics of each of the above :-)) it 
might be helpful for global maintainers to look at this so that they can 
see how their activities contribute to GDB.


Me?  Architect/Adminstrator + core.  While I'm a maintainer for a few 
specific area's (remote and mips) that is very very low down, same for 
development.

Andrew