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

[Tobias Schlüter <tobias dot schlueter at physik dot uni-muenchen dot de>]

Brooks Moses wrote:
> I'm not entirely sure that I agree with formalizing this for the Fortran 
> maintainers in bulk, at least without discussion.  My understanding (and 
> it's entirely possible that I've missed something) was that this wasn't 
> so much a formal rule as a general custom -- and, being a custom rather 
> than a formal rule, unobjectionable to break when appropriate.
>
> 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?
>
> Mostly what I want is some discussion about what we expect this to mean 
> as a formal rule, and how strictly we're expecting to interpret it.  For 
> values of "we" meaning both the GFortran maintainers, and the wider GCC 
> maintainer community.

I think all rules have to give in to reality.  In gfortran it's happened 
in the past that patches that went unreviewed, went in based on the 
convictions of the author that their patch is right.  I don't think this 
is a bad thing, as long as we find that we can trust eachother.  Which I 
believe is the case in the Fortran FE community.

> (I think I'd also like to register a very small polite complaint about 
> the introduction of a new category of maintainers without any sort of 
> announcement or discussion on the gcc@ list, at least insofar as I could 
> find by searching on "autopoiesis" in the archives.)

Kenneth has explained how this came about, and how this is not a new, 
formal category as the non-algorithmic maintainers were in the 
follow-up, and I'm fine with that.  OTOH I do object (with a smiley) to 
being labeled something that -- even though I can understand its meaning 
from the ancient greek I studied -- I haven't the slightest idea how to 
pronounce (sorry, "autopoiesis" is not in the dictionaries that I 
checked).  I think "non-autonomous" would do the job perfectly well, 
without putting community members who didn't study philosophy into the dark.

Cheers,
- Tobi