Re: [Gdbheads] proposed change to GDB maintainership rules

[David Carlton]

On Thu, 29 Jan 2004 11:23:51 -0500, Andrew Cagney <address@hidden> said:

> Since Cygnus was dominating development, and had most of the GDB
> developers on their payroll (at that time it including me), and to
> this day "Cygnus" still has the largest single block of devlopers,
> it had to be clear that no core developer, nor I as overall lead
> developer could override an area lead's decision (if we disagreed we
> had to present a pervasive technical argument).

I don't know if this had to be clear in 2000; it certainly isn't clear
to me right now.  I look through MAINTAINERS - the list of global
maintainers contains a lot of non-Red Hat e-mail addresses, but there
are many areas where the only local maintainers are Red Hat employees.
And both now and the last time this discussion came up on the GDB
mailing list, the loudest voice for maintaining that control was a Red
Hat employee.

Right now, Red Hat employees can, if they wish, block almost any
significant change to GDB.  Right now, if Red Hat decides that its
employees should devote almost all of their time to Red Hat-specific
work instead of maintaining the public GDB sources, then they can
impose a huge drag on GDB work.

When I see <address@hidden> arguing that <address@hidden> and
<address@hidden> should be able to block the C++ work of
<address@hidden> and <address@hidden>, and that one main reason
for doing this is to prevent Red Hat from dominating GDB, I feel that
I've somehow entered bizarro world.

David Carlton
address@hidden