Re: [Gdbheads] Steering Committee nominations

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Wed, 18 Feb 2004 11:55:07 -0600
> From: Benjamin Kosnik <address@hidden>
> 
> For glibc:
> Mark Brown, Paul Eggert, Andreas Jaeger, Jakub Jelinek, Roland McGrath
> and Andreas Schwab
> 
> At least four of these people are active contributors (out of six).
> 
> For gcc:
> Per Bothner, Joe Buck, David Edelsohn, Kaveh R. Ghazi, Torbjorn
> Granlund, Jeffrey A. Law, Marc Lehmann, Jason Merrill, David Miller,
> Mark Mitchell, Toon Moene, Gerald Pfeifer, Joel Sherrill, Jim Wilson
> 
> At least nine or ten of these people are active contributors (out of 
> fourteen).
> 
> So, it seems as if there is precedent for letting maintainers on the
> steering committee.

Thanks for the examples, but with all due respect, I'm not sure they
are relevant here to the degree that they invalidate my comments.

The GDB committee is being reincarnated for a very specific reason.
GDB development has been going on for quite some time without an
active committee; we are reviving it now because the social dynamics
between the current developers shows--how shall I put it?--symptoms of
a certain instability that some of the developers think is serious
enough to undermine the project's success in the long run.  Do the
other projects you mention have similar problems?  If not, their
precedent is not very relevant to our case.

I think the most important first task of the new committee will be to
repair the communications between the active developers and restore
the atmosphere of mutual trust.  I don't see how can that be done if
the same developers who cannot agree on some issue on the GDB lists
put on their committee hats and try to arbiter in those same issues.
I don't see how the rulings of such a committee could have the moral
authority and respect that I think are needed to act as an arbiter in
the kind of heated debates that led to the decision to revive the
committee.