Re: Maintainer policy for GDB

[Daniel Jacobowitz <drow at false dot org>]

On Fri, Nov 25, 2005 at 10:36:05AM +0200, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > Date: Fri, 25 Nov 2005 00:28:10 -0500
> > From: Christopher Faylor <cgf-use-the-mailinglist-please@sourceware.org>
> > 
> > How about a month for the timeout period?  That won't accommodate a long
> > vacation but it should be enough for most scenarios.
> > 
> > Would adding a rider that says "Two global maintainers can agree to
> > apply the patch after two weeks of nonresponse" complicate things too
> > much?  I would hate for an important patch to languish just because
> > someone was on vacation.
> 
> How about if we start from something simple, like 3 weeks of timeout
> and no other conditions?  Then, a year or so from now, we could
> analyze the results and see if we need to augment the rules.

You see, I was thinking a couple of days, or up to a week.  I think
much longer than a week is effectively the same as not allowing
timeouts at all.

Please keep in mind that there are two very different cases: existing
maintainers who are not authorized to commit in a certain area, and
occasional or new contributors to GDB submitting a patch for review. 
Do you want to be the one to explain to all the latter group "no,
sorry, we can't look at your patch for three weeks"?  I've done the
"no, sorry, we need so-and-so to look at this" routine a fair number of
times in the past year, and it's no fun.  With just a week, it's easy
to give the contributor feedback on the style et cetera - which often
takes a week anyway - while waiting for comments from the responsible
party.

I think such a long timeout would be a mistake.  But alternatively, we
could use a long timeout and an aggressive policy for maintainers who
time out repeatedly - politely remove them from responsibility (shift
into the authorized section).  How do you feel about that?

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz
CodeSourcery, LLC