Re: Machine maintainer veto.

[Siddhesh Poyarekar <siddhesh dot poyarekar at gmail dot com>]

On 3 July 2015 at 09:21, Carlos O'Donell <carlos@redhat.com> wrote:
> The key issue is to balance the project goals and the needs of
> the users of the particular machine. To do that effectively the
> machine maintainers have to have some level of veto to add or
> remove things to the machine they know and understand best.
>
> https://sourceware.org/glibc/wiki/MAINTAINERS#Machine_maintainers

I don't quite agree with this:

    "... This veto can be used to prevent changes that break ABI or
API, or it can be used to include new ABI support for the machine even
if there is no consensus on how best to proceed"

While I acknowledge that arch maintainers have a better understanding
of their architecture, it doesn't automatically translate to a deep
enough understanding of glibc in general and that can break things in
irreversible ways.  Also, arch maintainers are as accountable to the
glibc community as they are to their customers or their organization,
so ignoring consensus goes against that principle.

There is a middle ground though, where arch maintainers have enough
freedom to decide what goes into their port as long as it doesn't
conflict with the goals of the community.  So it should be OK if a
maintainer chooses to ignore objection for a patch from a community
member on minor differences.  However, if there is sustained
opposition from the community in general, it would be inappropriate
for the maintainer to ignore that feedback.

I admit this is still vague, but ISTM to be a better place to be than
a full veto described in the wiki page.

Siddhesh
-- 
http://siddhesh.in