Re: Automated testing framework (was: V3: SPARC bug and tree freeze)

[Richard Stallman <rms at gnu dot org>]

    >> Please send this paragraph to rms@gnu.org and he'll send you the
    >> appropriate forms.

Please don't ask me, ask the GCC maintainers.  Telling contributors
what forms to use is part of a package maintainer's job.

What forms to use (and whether papers are needed at all) depends on
what the contribution consists of.  Since the package maintainers have
to read and study the contribution anyway to decide whether they want
to use it, once they know the criteria for papers they can very
efficiently also tell the contributor what we need as regards forms.

Posting the criteria proved to be a bad idea, because a fair number of
people don't fully understand them at first reading.  Asking each
contributor to individually apply them to his own case means that most
people only do this once.  That has led to frequent mistakes.  They
were posted in the GCC web pages, but sometimes people working on
other projects tried to use them, so the mistakes affected other
packages too.

It is much more reliable for the maintainer to do this, because the
number of GNU package maintainers is much smaller; once a maintainer
understands the criteria (by asking me questions if necessary), he can
do the job easily and reliably.

To have me to this job for all GNU packages would be even more
reliable--but I don't have time to do it.  (And I would have to look
at each contribution in order to decide.)  When this task is divided
among the various package maintainers, it is a small job for each of
them, compared with the work of maintaining the package.  It takes
much less time to write a message saying what papers we need for a
change than to study the change and understand it.