Re: Status

[Stan Shebs <shebs at apple dot com>]

Jim Kingdon wrote:

> But I guess the GCC system makes sense to me.  If something is enough
> of an issue to be a "technical controversy" in the sense of something
> people would escalate to the chief technical maintainer/team, you kind
> of want to get people on board as much as possible.  Because if you
> proceed without _some_ level of consensus (not among the whole world,
> but at least among a small group of people most involved), then it
> creates various kinds of pain.
> 
> I mean, there is almost always a way out (e.g. make it an option or
> something, if there really a demand for both solutions).

The hard part comes when somebody has to make a single choice.  For
instance, Linus has often had to make arbitrary decisions, in some
cases without necessarily being the big PCMCIA-PS/2-bridge :-) expert.
But in general people agree that his involvement has been better for
Linux' continued evolution than not.  Could a committee have done as
well?  Hard to say.

> One thing I don't want to be single-string is the process of making
> checkins which are believed to be relatively uncontroversial.  Right
> now there is a big problem when the person listed in MAINTAINERS for a
> particular file gets busy or is on vacation or whatever.  Or to put it
> another way, being a maintainer should grant you the right to overrule
> other people but it shouldn't grant you the right to stop things in
> their tracks.  Or something like that.

Absolutely.  I hope that every maintainer has sent in their login info
and ssh keys and all, there should be no obstacle to them making
their own commits now, right?

Stan