Re: [Gdbheads] proposed change to GDB maintainership rules

[Michael Snyder]

Ian Lance Taylor wrote:
> David Carlton <address@hidden> writes:
>
>
> > I don't work on breakpoints, so I hadn't noticed this particular
> > example; the main benefit that I saw of this pruning is that the
> > testsuite had no local maintainers, which all of a sudden meant that
> > any global maintainer could approve testsuite patches, which meant
> > that a _lot_ of testsuite patches went in.
>
>
> I would have to agree that any global maintainer ought to be able to
> approve patches to any part of the code.  That is how both gcc and the
> binutils work, and I think it has proven to be effective in practice.

This is how I always understood gdb to be working too.
I was stunned when Andrew announced one day that it wasn't.

When we transitioned from the former mostly-cygnus maintainance
to the current arrangement, we somewhat arbitrarily divvied up
some of the components of gdb and assigned them to individual
maintainers -- but my understanding of that was that it was intended
to make sure that there was somebody whose job it was to review
a patch *if no one else did first* -- not that the designated
person was the *only* maintainer entitled to review a patch.

The former would help patches get reviewed.  The later would
inhibit them from being reviewed.  I do not understand how we
ended up with the later, but that's what we seem to have now,
and the upshot is that patches sometimes don't get reviewed.

> Mind you, both projects have additional rules, like patches may not
> cause testsuite regressions, and, if they do cause regressions which
> are not fixed, any other global maintainer can revert them freely.

We've never spelled out the later, but the former is well understood.