Re: [Gdbheads] Steering Committee nominations

[Daniel Jacobowitz]

On Thu, Feb 19, 2004 at 08:55:05AM +0200, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> I don't see how do you make the leap of logic between ``none of them
> understood the details of changes'' and ``in practice [committee
> members] should be active developers''.  I think this requires
> explanation.  In particular, how hard it is, in your opinion, to
> understand the details of the changes?  A good programmer should be
> able to read code written by others and understand what it does
> without any difficulty, don't you think?  In fact, every global
> maintainer does precisely that when they review patches in an area
> that is not their direct responsibility.  If we can do that, why
> cannot others?

I don't think "read the code" makes any sense in this context.  David's
example was the merge of a branch, which a non-trivial number of the
existing global maintainers think is the wrong approach, and which
constitutes the full time work of probably a dozen programmers for two
years.  Even someone with a solid, fresh-vintage understanding of
everything ever written about compilers would have a lot of trouble
giving any kind of opinion about that code if they weren't also
intimately familiar with the existing code, not just a knowledge of its
general structure.

Maybe it is an extreme example, but it's one of the stated roles of the
steering committee.

I also don't think a knowledge of "general structure" would be enough
to have a useful technical opinion.

This is, of course, only my opinion.

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz
MontaVista Software                         Debian GNU/Linux Developer