Re: Some thoughts about steerring commitee work

[Joe Buck <Joe dot Buck at synopsys dot COM>]

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.

> Could you please give us more explanation about your decisions.  Could
> you please be more open in your work.

The SC actually does very little.  Almost all of the work is conducted
via this list, IRC, etc.  The day-to-day decisions are made by
maintainers.  Often two weeks go by without a message on the SC list.

> 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.

> 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.