notes from gcc summit maintenance BOF

[Gabriel Dos Reis]

Benjamin Kosnik <bkoz@redhat.com> writes:

| The following are the notes I took during the discussion at the GCC
| summit on Monday, May 26th.

Many thanks for having taken these notes and posted them.

[ After the facts, this BOF would have been much more productive for me
  than the things that made me unable to attend the summit,  Sad.  ]

[...]

|   making things friendlier for new developers 

Was the release process mentioned/discussed?

|   maintainership
| 
|     more people who can approve patches

I think this is a real issue.  I would like like us find some answers.

I fully understand GCC is largely a volunteer project and one can not 
"press" maintainers to quickly review patches.  However, on the other
hand, long review time is too discourageing and hinders real
development. 
Where one week would suffice for a given task, our current review
process can make it take at least twice, trice or even more, with
additional unnecessary complications.  
We should not let bureaucracy get in the way.

Having, for example, just two maintainers for a largely used and
actively worked on front-end like cc1plus is just too discouraging,
especially given that they are overloaded by other pressing tasks.
Don't get me wrong, this is NOT meant to be a criticism against Mark
or Jason or others.  
The bootleneck is no longer in understanding the bugs and fixing them
(i.e. the real work) but in the review-process. Please let shift the
bottleneck from bureacracy to real work, and lower it down a bit.

Thanks,

-- Gaby