Re: [patch,committed] Make Fortran maintainers "Non-Autopoiesis Maintainers"

[Brooks Moses <brooks dot moses at codesourcery dot com>]

At 09:40 PM 6/14/2007, Steve Kargl wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 14, 2007 at 08:48:22PM -0700, Brooks Moses wrote:
> > I have no objection to this as a custom for GFortran, certainly -- I
> > think it's a very good idea, and as a custom I very much support it.
> > However, there have historically been reasonable exceptions to it.  In
> > particular, I've committed several documentation patches without review,
> > and I have seen a few small patches submitted by maintainers for
> > comments rather than a formal review and then committed when there were
> > no dissenting comments.  My understanding at the time was that these
> > were entirely acceptable things to do; is this still true, or no?
>
> As the Fortran maintainer the pre-approved your doc patches (and
> Daniel's patches) I feel I should comment.  The gfortran docs
> were in such a mess that neither you nor Danial could possibly
> commit a change that would make the docs worse.  Well, I guess
> you could have, but your previous involvement in the mailing list
> suggested otherwise.

Indeed -- but my impression was that, when I became a maintainer, that 
explicit pre-approval was no longer needed.  Perhaps I misunderstood?

Though I guess it does amount to the same thing in practice -- if you 
hadn't encouraged me to commit documentation patches without troubling 
people for reviews of each one, then I would have assumed once I became a 
maintainer that I should continue to request reviews of the documentation 
patches I proposed, and would have done so.

> I haven't looked at the guidelines for this new category in that
> I doubt it will change the day-to-day interaction of the gfortran
> developers.  In general, we ask for reviews when necessary and
> commit obvious fixes as they arise.  In my 4+ years of hacking on
> gfortran, I cannot recall a single dispute among the developers.
> Sure, there's been disagreement, but not dispute.

Oh, definitely.  That's sort of why I wanted to comment on this; insofar as 
this is documenting the status quo, that's a good thing, but I wanted to 
make sure that it wasn't setting up a situation where people in the rest of 
the GCC community would expect us to follow more rigid rules than we 
actually do.

- Brooks