Re: glibc subtree maintainers list - any updates?

[Roland McGrath <roland at redhat dot com>]

It would be great if you could rewrite that web page. :-)
(You should already have access via savannah cvs.)

It is somewhat out of date, and I'm not sure how useful its organization
is.  It's nice to have that information around and current.  
But, like Daniel, I wonder what you are actually using it for.

Are you looking for specific people to CC on bugzilla reports that are
machine-specific?  When an issue is clearly particular to an architecture,
it may be useful to poke a particular person to weigh in on it.  But, all
appropriate such people are expected to be on libc-alpha and/or libc-ports
already.  So it may be simplest just to post a request on the mailing list
(libc-ports if the architecture is in ports, libc-alpha if in core)
pointing to the bugzilla.  That also gets the attention of anyone else who
happens to know enough about that architecture to help with that issue.

As to updating that page, firstly it should say something about 2.3 vs 2.4
in the Supported Systems part.  For the maintainers info, it's only useful
to talk about the trunk state of things.

In Subtree Maintainers, some email addresses are old; you can find each
person's name in a recent ChangeLog entry to see what address they
currently prefer for glibc purposes; for people who have gnu.org aliases,
that is usually the best thing to use (it's right for me, though I use
different addresses in log entries).  Also "ppc" is really "powerpc".

The statement "All architecture-specific or system-specific directories
not listed here are currently not actively maintained." is not quite
true.  For one thing, it doesn't list sysdeps/unix and so forth, and
sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux that are "system-specific" but in fact part of
the "generic" core for maintenance purposes.  It should separately
indicate the list in the core tree and the list in the ports repository.
As of now, we like to think that all of the architectures in the core
tree are being quite actively maintained.  (Ones that aren't, we've
moved to ports.)  A few ports architectures are pretty actively
maintained, but just because there is a person on the list who might
even answer, doesn't mean that it's actively maintained (it might just
mean there is someone to talk to if you want to work on fixing it).
Conversely just because it's actively maintained doesn't mean it's
actually quite working; Carlos might like to have a pointer to his
status on hppa work.

It would be more useful to group the related directories together, and
perhaps include a config triplet in the heading.  Then there are just a
few blocks, and those are:

* core
** alpha: Richard Henderson <rth@redhat.com>
** i386: Ulrich Drepper <drepper@redhat.com>
** x86_64: ??? Andreas Jaeger ??? Ulrich Drepper ???
** ia64: ??? Jakub Jelinek ??? H.J. Lu ???
** powerpc: Steven Munroe <munroesj@us.ibm.com>
** s390: Martin Schwidefsky <schwidefsky@de.ibm.com>
** sparc: Jakub Jelinek <jakub@redhat.com>
** sh: Kaz Kojima <kkojima@rr.iij4u.or.jp>
** hurd: Roland McGrath <roland@gnu.org>

* ports
** m68k: Andreas Schwab <schwab@suse.de>
** mips: Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@false.org>
** arm: Phil Blundell <philb@gnu.org>, Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@false.org>
** am33: Alexandre Oliva <aoliva@redhat.com>
** hppa: Carlos O'Donell <carlos@systemhalted.org>
** powerpc/nofpu: Steven Munroe <munroesj@us.ibm.com>

Those are the people nominally responsible and who should sign off on
ABI choices specific to that machine and so forth, who "represent the
users" of the architecture, though certainly not necessarily the people
who work most on that architecture's code.  (For most of the core linux
architectures, Jakub does more fixing, testing, and proactive watching
out for architecture issues, than everyone else.)


Thanks,
Roland