Re: Some thoughts about steerring commitee work

["Vladimir N. Makarov" <vmakarov at redhat dot com>]

Ian Lance Taylor wrote:

> > > > Ian, may be I am wrong but I see a problem that some important for all
> > > > GCC community things are discussed only on IRC.  Not all people are on
> > > > IRC.  Moreover some people avoiding the IRC for some reasons.
> > > >
> > > >        
> > > There will always be private conversations about GCC.  You can't
> > > prevent that.  IRC is less private than other places.
> > >
> > > When I said lobbying, I meant only that I complained about it.  I
> > > could have complained about it in e-mail the same way.  There were no
> > > important conversations about it on IRC.  If the SC members use IRC at
> > > all, they don't use #gcc.
> > > I'm having a hard time interpreting your comments because I don't
> > > understand what you want to be done differently.
> > >
> > >
> > >      
> > I am not against IRC.  We have free speech right (which means some
> > responsibility too).  We could (and we do) discuss whatever we want
> > wherever we want with whom we want.  I just wish that some discussion
> > important for all community were discussed not only IRC because they
> > involve not only people who are on IRC.
> >    
>
> I'm still honestly trying to figure out just what you mean here.
>
> Do you mean: the discussion that there are holes in maintainership
> patterns is important for the community, and should have been
> discussed on the mailing list, rather than IRC?  To me that doesn't
> rise to the level of being important for the community.  I mean, I
> toss off all sorts of comments all the time.  In my last message I
> tossed off a comment about reload being our major problem on the i386.
> I hope and assume that most people ignore most of these comments.  It
> wouldn't make sense for me or anyone to send out an e-mail note for
> every random thought.
>
> Or do you mean something eles?
>
> The important thing for the community is that Diego and I have now
> been appointed non-algorithmic global maintainers.  That was duly
> announced.  I guess we could have had a discussion about whether Diego
> and I should have been appointed, or whether that position should have
> been created at all.  That discussion does have some importance for
> the community, but it didn't happen on IRC, at least not when I was
> there.  If it happened at all, it happened on the steering committee
> mailing list.  So, is that what you mean?  Or am I just totally
> offbase?
>
> If I'm getting carried away with this topic, let me know.
>
>  
Ian, no you are perfectly right about the topic.  To be honest I meant 
the both.

The first I agree with you that we need more global maintainers because 
some of them (I mean Richard) is not active most of time.  There are 
always patches where the reviewer need to have a good knowledge of all 
compiler.  I've just rewieved the patch where necessary to know 
scheduler, software pipelining, ia64 and ppc machine-dependent code.  So 
four people needs to approve the patch.  And I think that we needed to 
discuss lack of global maintainers on more wider basis (not just on IRC).

The second, it was a bit suspicious to me that in one day two Google 
guys got global maintainership although as I wrote Diego did not work on 
rtl for a long time.  One the other hand, I see Google has a good 
developers and may be I was a bit paranoid.  But after this discussion I 
see the situation more clear and not soo gloomy.  With my point of view, 
maintainerhsip is a burden, it distracts people from an interesting 
job.  I should be glad that there are some people who is going to take it.

Ian, I am sorry,  I'll be on vacation next week and will be 
inaccessible.  So if you want to discuss something more, we could do 
that in a week. In any case, we have such opportunity soon on the gcc 
summit.   But this discussion already really helped me to understand the 
situation better.

Vlad