Re: [Gdbheads] proposed change to GDB maintainership rules

[David Carlton]

On Tue, 27 Jan 2004 13:49:57 -0500, Richard Stallman <address@hidden> said:

> If people are proposing that we should change the way this part of
> the GNU system is maintained, the first question is, is there really
> a problem?  What useful features or improvements does the GNU system
> lack, which it could have had if GDB maintenance were done
> differently?  How important are these features?

That's a very hard question to answer.  I feel strongly that the
current system is turning away potentially productive effort and
volunteers.  So I might be tempted to claim that "if we change the
rules, we could get an additional 50% more work on GDB".  But there's
no way to predict exactly what specific features that additional 50%
of work would lead to - it depends on what people want to work on.
That's the way volunteer projects work, after all.

Having said that, I would say that, if the rules proposed had been in
place for the last year, then GDB 6.0 would have had better support
for C++ nested types and namespaces, and that it would also have had
non-user-visible changes to improve its maintainability (the linespec
parser would be in better shape, the ways in which we treat mangled
and demangled names would be more consistent, it would probably be
more const-correct).  Some of these changes will come along in GDB
6.1; some of them won't.


>From my point of view, the key questions to ask are:

1) Do we believe that the current lists of local maintainers represent
   the only people whose judgment we trust on those pieces of code?
   For example, do we believe that nobody other than Jim Blandy and
   Elena Zannoni can be trusted to work on symbol table code?  Do we
   believe that nobody other than Michael Chastain and myself can be
   trusted with the C++ testsuite?  Do we believe that nobody other
   than Michael Snyder and Mark Kettenis can be trusted with GDB's
   threads code?

2) Do we believe that the global maintainers, if given the ability to
   approve patches anywhere as long as nobody else objected, would
   then start approving patches that would hurt GDB?

To me, the answer to both of those questions is "no".  If other people
disagree with me on either of these, I'd like to hear the reasons why.
If other people agree, then we should change GDB's maintenance
policies accordingly.


David Carlton
address@hidden