Richard Sandiford appointed RTL maintainer

[Gerald Pfeifer]

On Tue, 28 Jun 2011, Diego Novillo wrote:
>> * ambiguity of the decision. What does RTL optimizers/RTL maintainer mean?
> Anything related to RTL, in my view.  As much as possible, I would lean 
> towards flexible definitions of maintenance boundaries.  If we make them 
> too inflexible, this will not help reviews (many patches cross some 
> boundary in trivial ways).
> 
> We should trust maintainers/reviewers to know their own boundaries and 
> decide whether a patch touches too many areas they don't feel 
> comfortable reviewing. This has happened many times in the past, with
> no negative consequences.  So, reviewers are by and large DTRT.

I agree, and note that this was not a new area being introduced, but
one that existed as such for a while.  To reemphasize the point, I know 
projects where there is just one status that allows for committing to
the tree(s) and every committer is assumed to use good judgement on
what to commit/approve and when to defer.  And like Diego I feel where 
applicable (global reviewers, broader areas,...) this has been working
out well for GCC.

>> * appointments are technical decisions and it should be not in
>>   jurisdiction of SC.

For the record, while I can understand everything else written here, I 
personally disagree with the statement that appointments are technical 
decisions only.  As we have seen over time (more so in other projects
than GCC, luckily) there is a huge, huge non-technical component to that.

> So, according to what we discussed in London, the SC will essentially 
> not make appointment decisions.  We will recommend them, and they will 
> agree.  If we find unreasonable resistance, we will then see what to do 
> about that.

The question, I guess, is who "we" is.  Though, practically, what you 
describe and what has been happening more or less for years is pretty
much the same. :-)

Gerald