Re: Maintainer policy for GDB

[Christopher Faylor <me at cgf dot cx>]

On Fri, Nov 25, 2005 at 09:53:17PM +0200, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>>Date: Fri, 25 Nov 2005 10:57:43 -0500
>>From: Daniel Jacobowitz
>>
>>>I'm not sure I understand what you mean by ``friction''.  Can you
>>>elaborate?
>>
>>I expect that contributors will get annoyed at maintainers who are
>>responsible but inactive (because they've added delay), and in return
>>those maintainers will get annoyed at contributors for any comments
>>they make about the subject.
>
>We could ask that maintainers immediately acknowledge seeing the RFA,
>and tell the contributor the ETA for their review.  I think this will
>avoid annoyances in many cases: people usually get annoyed that they
>don't see any response whatsoever, not because they need to wait for a
>few days.

I think this is a good idea.  I was trying to err in the direction of
being overcautious before but I'm comfortable with making the timeout
smaller, too.  How about if an area maintainer hasn't responded, in some
way, to email within a week, the patch is open for a general maintainer
to apply?

Isn't it reasonable to assume that an area maintainer should be reading
gdb-patches on at least a weekly frequency, assuming that they are not
out-of-town?  If they do this, then they should be able to at least send
a  "can't review now - will get to this in N days" type of message.  If
they don't respond to a message then presumably they are not available
at all.

I guess you could complicate this with more rules about what to do when
a maintainer responds but doesn't deliver but I don't think we need to
go there for now.

cgf