Re: [Gdbheads] proposed change to GDB maintainership rules

[Michael Snyder]

Ian Lance Taylor wrote:
> David Carlton <address@hidden> writes:
>
>
> > I don't entirely agree with this.  My impression is that there was a
> > fairly strong feeling that some sort of conflict resolution mechanism
> > was necessary, basically to prevent Andrew from having his way
> > whenever conflicts arose.  That's certainly the way I feel; I actually
> > don't come into conflict with Andrew very often, but I've seen it
> > happen to others on the list.  (I got the impression that other
> > people, people who have had more interaction with Andrew in the past,
> > felt more strongly than I did that we must have a way to prevent
> > Andrew from always having his way in disputes; perhaps others could
> > speak up to correct me on this matter?)
>
>
> Well, now we are talking about a different problem.  Thanks for making
> that clear.
>
> The only problem I saw clearly stated before was ``it takes too long
> for gdb patches to get approved.''
>
> You are now stating a completely different and seemingly unrelated
> problem, which might be written down as ``Andrew [Cagney] gets his way
> whenever conflicts arise, and he is not always right.''

You see the result of our trying to solve the problem
without naming it.  It was our hope that this could be
done without hurt feelings.  Obviously we didn't pull it off,
which I regret quite a lot.


> Do other people on this mailing list agree that this is a problem?
> Have I stated it correctly, or is there some more precise way to
> describe the problem?
>
>
> I can see why voting might apply to this problem, where I didn't see
> why voting would apply to the previously stated problem.
>
> I'll beat a dead horse here by saying that first you state the problem
> clearly, then you find the solution.  If you don't state the problem
> clearly, then the solution doesn't make sense.

We did state it clearly -- just not publicly.  The problem you name
has always been the one we were trying to solve.


> If I have stated this problem correctly, then I can see several
> possible solutions.
>
> * Realize that Andrew is generally right.
>
> * Convince Andrew to realize that in some cases he may be wrong.
>
> * If Andrew won't permit some patches to be checked in, have other
>   global maintainers start approving patches, and trust that Andrew
>   will not simply revert them, particularly if he is alone in his
>   opposition.

Although it has not happened in a while, Andrew has done exactly that.
This was, in fact, when he first (to my recollection) spelled out his
position that a blanket write maintainer did not really have blanket
write privileges.  Here's the thread, which does not include some
rather heated telephone conversations:

http://sources.redhat.com/ml/gdb-patches/2002-09/msg00394.html
http://sources.redhat.com/ml/gdb-patches/2002-09/msg00442.html
http://sources.redhat.com/ml/gdb-patches/2002-09/msg00448.html

It was about a month after this that Andrew changed the
MAINTAINERS file to read "global maintainers" instead of
"blanket write maintainers".