Re: [Gdbheads] proposed change to GDB maintainership rules

[David Carlton]

On Thu, 29 Jan 2004 19:42:00 -0500, Elena Zannoni <address@hidden> said:

> I wish I could answer, honestly. However, you have more information
> on how this group was formed than I do. All I have are some facts
> (that I know true) but not all the facts.

Here is the information that I know of.  I'm not naming names of
participants, because I don't think it's my position to do so, and I'm
probably being inaccurate in other ways; anybody should feel free to
ask more questions or to correct inaccuracies.

The pre-history: there have been discussions in the past about GDB's
maintenance situation.  I can only comment on what I've seen in the
last year and a half; its main manifestation was the thread starting
at <http://sources.redhat.com/ml/gdb/2003-02/msg00277.html> (see also
its brief offshoot,
<http://sources.redhat.com/ml/gdb/2003-02/msg00528.html>), and the
issue has sometimes come up in the (few) instances when I have met one
of the other GDB maintainers in person.

At some point (the end of October, I guess), some people decided to
make another stab at improving the situation.  Here, a key decision
was made: they did not want to involve Andrew in the initial
discussion.  Their reason for this is that he has blocked such
proposals in the past, and that they have repeatedly observed him
dominate others who didn't present a unified front against him.  So
they felt that they needed a room of their own to figure out two
things:

1) Did they agree that there really was a problem?

2) Could they settle on a proposed solution?

This decision to keep the discussion private from Andrew has been
controversial, and maybe was misguided.  Having said that, I for one
am not going to apologize for doing so, though I certainly wish that
we'd found a better way to avoid some of the resulting animosity.  I
believe that privately complaining about people in authority is both
natural and acceptable.  I have been known, for example, to complain
about one of my bosses at work - I complain about this person to my
wife, I grouse about this person with my co-workers.  I do not,
however, grouse about this person in his office, over the public
address system, or on the company's public e-mail lists.

As you have mentioned, that initial group consisted entirely of Red
Hat employees; I gather (though I did not know that at the time, and
still am not convinced that it's relevant) that none of those people
currently work in the same division of Red Hat that you and Andrew do.
However, the group was _immediately_ expanded to include people with
no Red Hat or Cygnus affiliation - a message from myself is the
seventh message in the relevant e-mail archive, and none of the
previous six messages contain any information of substance.

Over the course of the next month, via e-mail and weekly phone
conversations, we discussed the matter.  We talked about what we
didn't like about GDB (delays in patch approval, Andrew winning
conversations through persistence as opposed to persuasion), as well
as specific issues that were important to us, and we tossed concrete
suggestions back and forth.  We also tried to expand the group to
include more people, with the main criteria being that the people were
active on GDB and probably wouldn't tell Andrew that this discussion
was taking place.  (We didn't do this expansion quite fast enough - to
anybody who wasn't included, _please_ don't take it personally.)

By the end of the next month, we had pretty much figured out what
changes we thought were a good idea.  Also, at about that time, you,
having gotten wind of the existence of this discussion, complained.
So, at the beginning of December, we presented the proposal that we'd
settled on.  At that point, we agreed that there was no reason to keep
up a private discussion, and the discussion has moved entirely to this
mailing list.

On a tangential note - you and/or Andrew (I can't remember, and am too
lazy to sift through my archives) have presented Eric Bachalo as
somehow leading this.  As far as I have seen, that impression is
entirely inaccurate.  He was kind enough to arrange for our phone
conversations, but his participation in our discussions (whether via
phone or e-mail) has been minimal.  I have no reason to believe that
he has been doing anything other than what any good manager should do:
he has tried to help those working under him resolve a difficulty that
they were having.  But, to the best of my knowledge, he hasn't pressed
them to do so, he hasn't guided their actions, he hasn't done anything
that could possibly be construed as being for the benefit of Red Hat
instead of the GDB community as a whole.

David Carlton
address@hidden