From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 959 invoked by alias); 19 Feb 2003 02:26:38 -0000 Mailing-List: contact gdb-help@sources.redhat.com; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: gdb-owner@sources.redhat.com Received: (qmail 936 invoked from network); 19 Feb 2003 02:26:38 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO takamaka.act-europe.fr) (142.179.108.108) by 172.16.49.205 with SMTP; 19 Feb 2003 02:26:38 -0000 Received: by takamaka.act-europe.fr (Postfix, from userid 507) id D8575D34B6; Tue, 18 Feb 2003 18:26:36 -0800 (PST) Date: Wed, 19 Feb 2003 02:26:00 -0000 From: Joel Brobecker To: Elena Zannoni , Andrew Cagney , gdb@sources.redhat.com Subject: Re: [maint] The GDB maintenance process Message-ID: <20030219022636.GJ2105@gnat.com> References: <20030217180709.GA19866@nevyn.them.org> <20030218042847.50F2E3CE5@localhost.redhat.com> <20030217180709.GA19866@nevyn.them.org> <20030218023553.2BBB73D02@localhost.redhat.com> <20030217180709.GA19866@nevyn.them.org> <15953.20132.193102.752916@localhost.redhat.com> <20030219014904.GA11446@nevyn.them.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20030219014904.GA11446@nevyn.them.org> User-Agent: Mutt/1.4i X-SW-Source: 2003-02/txt/msg00330.txt.bz2 Daniel said: > I want to share a piece of perspective on why I raise this issue now. > I'm finding the GDB development process to be too slow to be workable - > patches take a month or more routinely, > Maybe that means that I just don't have the time and the patience to be > a useful contributor to GDB. Me, I think that it means that we need to > make the process less painful for contributors. So far, I have only really started making some contributions maybe a year and a half ago, and my level of involvment is very far from a lot of the developpers I see on this list. But I tend to agree with Daniel that patches _sometimes_ take a very long time to be included, and that it is easy to be discouraged. I think there are also a lot of patches floating around that are waiting for at least a review. One of the ACT developpers actually stopped submitting his patches, just because he did not receive any feedback. And yet he spent the effort of creating a PR and attaching the patch to this PR! So I am submitting the changes on his behalf now, and took on the job of trying to push for these patches to be reviewed. I agree that we are all very busy, and that it's natural that reviews do not always happen in a timely manor. In fact, I am generally happy with the delay-to-review, but my feeling is that the GDB community is losing a lot of valuable work because it never gets looked at. With my modest experience on the GDB project, and without any experience on any other GNU project like this, it's difficult to make any recommendation. My feeling is that we could try relaxing a bit the rules, and allow global maintainers to approves changes if the associated maintainer is unable to review them in say, a few (couple?) of weeks. Look at http://sources.redhat.com/ml/gdb-patches/2002-10/msg00586.html for intance. This patch addresses a GDB crash, and the fix has been sitting since Oct 30th, despite 2 pings, 1 recommendation for approval, and a message to the maintainers. I do not want to blame the maintainers here, but in my opinion the global maintainers should be able to act as surrogates when they see that a patch has been sitting for more than a certain duration, and they have the knowledge to review it. -- Joel