Re: Mainline in regression-fix mode after Thanksgiving

[Joe Buck <Joe.Buck@synopsys.COM>]

On Tue, Nov 23, 2004 at 09:23:21AM -0800, Mark Mitchell wrote:
> It's not purely for me to say.  Making it our policy to auto-assign 
> regressions would be something of a societal change, and, as such, 
> should only be done as part of a broader consensus.

> Personally, I think this is a reasonable thing to do, and I've in fact 
> given the bugmasters explict permission to assign bugs to me if the 
> regression comes from a patch I've committed.  Assigning the regression, 
> however, is only half the problem: the other problem is getting the 
> assignee to actually fix the problem.

In a corporate environment, where programmers are paid to maintain code,
an assignment policy means that it is a particular person's job to fix a
bug, and that some penalty will be paid if that person does not do his/her
job.  But we don't have that here; it's a volunteer environment.  Under
such a circumstance, the only reasonable thing that assignment can mean in
the GCC project is that the assignee has agreed to work on a bug fix, and
anyone reading the PR can see that it is being worked on.

Under these circumstances, I don't think that the bugmasters should assign
bugs to people unless there is pre-existing agreement (for example,
Mark has agreed to accept bug assignments as described above).  After
all, we have an alternative: if a patch causes regressions and this isn't
promptly fixed, the patch can be reverted.

I suggest cc-ing the patch submitter when a regression is traced to a
patch, and also suggest that people assign bugs to themselves if they plan
to work on a fix, to avoid duplication of work.  That also means
"unassigning" the bug if other work intrudes, so someone else can pick up
the slack.