Re: [MAINT/RFC] Start devolving maintenance responsibility

[Andrew Cagney <ac131313 at cygnus dot com>]

Jim Kingdon wrote:
> 
> > Sorry, devolve, as a word, is probably more meaningful to people from
> > Commonwealth countries.
> 
> I'm familiar with the word (e.g. Scotland) but at least for me it has
> all these connotations of national sovereignty and power and such.
> For example, it is a dead end to assume that an OS vendor should
> automatically maintain GDB on that OS because they "own" the platform
> or something.
> 
> > The underlying concern I have isn't with people like you that have been
> > hacking on open code for years, its with people familar with GDB but not
> > so familar with open source.  For that reason, I think it is useful to
> > spell out, in basic terms, how the system should work.
> 
> Maybe link to The Cathedral and the Bazaar (which is well known) and
> Alan Cox's Town Council paper (which deserves to be better known and
> is at http://slashdot.org/features/98/10/13/1423253.shtml )?  I was
> just showing the Town Council paper to someone in a GDB context and it
> seemed to resonate.
> 
> I'm sure the looseness of this approach will make some people nervous.
> But you can't build trust through rules and policies either.  What is
> going to turn GDB development into the (more) vibrant community we
> want it to be is delivering on the promises to add maintainers and
> otherwise open up.  We've made great progress in the last month and
> let's keep it up.

Try this:

``
Note individuals who maintain parts of the debugger need approval to
check in changes outside of the immediate domain that they maintain.

If there is no maintainer for a given domain then the responsibility
falls to the head maintainer.

If there are several maintainers for a given domain then
responsibility falls to the first maintainer.  The first maintainer is
free to devolve maintainership responsibility anyway they like.

Refs: http://slashdot.org/features/98/10/13/1423253.shtml

''

	Andrew