Re: Maintainer policy for GDB

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz at gnu dot org>]

> From: David Carlton <david.carlton@sun.com>
> Date: Fri, 18 Nov 2005 14:46:45 -0800
> 
> > In other words, if responsibility doesn't come with some unique
> > authority, who will want such a responsibility?
> 
> One possible way to treat this question is as an empirical one.  To
> that end, one could ask people currently listed in MAINTAINERS as
> maintaining a given domain whether they would prefer to remain
> responsible for maintaining, or merely authorized, and why.  For
> example, would you be interested in being responsible for djgpp and/or
> documentation under the proposed new rules?  If so, why?

Thanks, that was a useful thought experiment.

After thinking about this for a while, I concluded that my main
reasons for being interested in becoming a responsible maintainer is
that I'd like to influence the development and maintenance of those
specific areas according to ideas I have.  For example, I might wish
to make sure the manual is well indexed: each important concept has a
@cindex entry, each command has a @kindex entry, the index entries are
well thought and easy to guess, and allow the reader to use the manual
as a reference, etc.

Now, under the suggested rules, somebody who is authorized to approve
patches to the documentation could commit changes that don't fit my
plan about indexing, without asking me, right?  How can I shape the
documentation according to my ideas if I don't have the final say?
The only way would be to revert changes and/or redo them myself.
Under the current scheme, I can refuse the approval unless and until
the contributor reworks the changes according to my standards.  With
that authority gone, I'm left dead in the water; doing everything
myself is not an option for me, given my chronic lack of free time,
and starting a revert war or going to the SC over disputes about
@cindex is either time-consuming or childishly silly or both.