Joe Buck wrote:
On Fri, Jun 15, 2007 at 08:50:49AM -0400, Vladimir N. Makarov wrote:
Looking at the last SC announcement, it is probably easy to get the
impression that SC is shrunk to David Edelsohn, may be Mark Mitchell
and Gerald Pfeifer.
That would be a mistake. Different SC members play different roles. Many
members play a role similar to outside members of boards of directors, and
the intent is to represent users, not just developers. For example, David
Miller represents the interests of the Linux kernel, Joel Sherill
represents embedded systems, Toon represents Fortran, etc. David Edelsohn
has been handling most of the announcements of decisions lately, but he is
not personally appointing people; he's announcing the results of a vote.
Thanks, for the clarification, Joe. I always like to put users first.
But I've just been thinking how some SC members which are not involed
development make right decision during a vote about the appointments.
Some GCC developers don't follow all GCC
development and it would be nice to have an explanation even for
trivial cases of appointments.
If you feel that someone should be appointed to some role, you can
contact an SC member and it can be discussed.
Sorry, it is even make me a bit scary becuase I don't know when the SC
decides that we need more maintainers and what maintainers. When should
we propose. After that I am just starting to think who usually propose
them.
In this situation, in my humble opinion it is better to inform
developers about doing such decision and ask them candidates.
I am agree with Richard that is a tricky political question. In this
case people could send candidates anonymously.
For example, about latest appointments of Diego and Ian as GWP. They
are good guys but I don't see Diego actively working on RTL or Ian
actively working on tree-SSA.
They were not granted unlimited GWP, but rather a limited form that
we call "non-algorithmic". See
http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2006-11/msg00582.html
for an explanation of what this means. Ian can't mess with the guts
of tree-SSA without approval from a maintainer in that area, for example.
These kinds of things represent a judgment call. In many cases the key
factor is whether the person knows what he does not know, and when he
needs to ask others for help.
Please don't get me wrong, I am not against Ian or Diego. I think a lot
of people could do non-algorithmic GWP (altough another question do they
want to). I've just thinking about improving the decision making.
I am sorry, I feel like I am annoying, please just tell me about that
and I will stop.
Vlad
