make me a linespec maintainer!

make me a linespec maintainer!

[David Carlton]

As a sort of test case for my message
<http://sources.redhat.com/ml/gdb/2003-02/msg00528.html>, I would like
to nominate myself as a linespec maintainer.  I've been working on
this code since November; in that time, I've given details about my
plans for the file (I posted a rewritten version of the file back in
November, with a follow-up in January), and I've commited a series of
patches which carry out perhaps half of that work.  These plans have
been generally looked at in a positive light; they are, I believe, the
only significant cleanup to that code since it was moved to
linespec.c.  I've read through and tried to understand every line of
code in that file (and usually succeeded in understanding it!); none
of my patches have required significant reworking to gain approval, as
far as I can remember.

But I'm not too optimistic about the future of this effort if it
continues on its present course.  I'm spending most of my GDB time
right now submitting patches for namespace and symtab stuff; Elena,
who has been kindly doing all the work of approving my linespec
patches, will also have to do much of the work of approving the
namespace and symtab patches.  It's already taken more than 3 months
to get this far; if the rate of progress slows down at all, I'm not
sure when, if ever, this process will be finished.  And that sounds to
me like a shame.

And, frankly, I think that I've shown myself deserving of trust in
this area: I've submitted a good plan, I've followed through with good
patches, and I don't think I should need approval for every step as I
continue reworking the code.  Obviously I'll ask for comment on
significant changes; but there are a lot of changes that I'd like to
make to the structure of the code that won't affect its functionality,
and I think I have a pretty good feel for the code.

So the easiest solution seems to be to make me a linespec maintainer:
I think that's best for the code in question, and I think that it
would save me (and Elena) time that would be better spent on other
efforts.  I'm acting as the maintainer of the code in practice; if I'm
given the title of maintainer, I'll be able to finish up the current
cleanups, and with luck will have time to actually fix some bugs and
make it const correct (decode_line_1 is the main reason why GDB
currently needs so many char *'s instead of const char *'s).

David Carlton
carlton@math.stanford.edu