Call for volunteers - GDB Release Manager

Call for volunteers - GDB Release Manager

[Stan Shebs]

For several years, Andrew Cagney has been ably serving as GDB's
release manager in addition to his general maintainer role, but
has now stepped back, to let somebody else have some of the fun.
The Steering Committee has decided to give everybody a crack at
the job by soliciting volunteers. Here is the formal description
of the role:

* The GDB Steering Committee appoints a Release Manager.

* The Release Manager is responsible for organizing, scheduling,
  and managing releases of GDB.

* The Release Manager decides the approval and commit policies
  for release branches, and can change them as needed.

* The release manager can resign at any time. The Steering Committee
  will appoint a replacement in a reasonable amount of time.

* The Steering Committee retains the authority to overrule or replace
  the Release Manager, but will not ordinarily do so.

What does all this mean? In my view, being a release manager is a
great way to get more involved with GDB without having to be an
oldtime hacker who knows every minute detail of call frames on hppa
or what dve3900-rom.c is supposed to be for. You get the latitude
to decide when a new version of GDB is good enough to be unleashed
on the world, which in turn becomes the debugger shipped with
GNU/Linux, *BSD, and other operating systems (a good thing for the
resume!) At the same time, you get to make the calls on whether
to fix tough bugs or let them go, though you'll get plenty of
advice from everybody else. :-) It's important to be comfortable
with CVS and net-based collaboration, and good to have touches of
both diplomatic and nagging skills.

If you're interested, we'd like to hear from you! You can either
volunteer publicly on this list, or send private mail to any SC
person (as listed on http://sourceware.org/gdb/committee). We
haven't set a fixed period to take names, but it's getting to be
time to start thinking about the next release, so the sooner you
get your name in, the sooner you can start making it happen.

Stan