Maintainership

Maintainership

[Stefan Monnier]

It's nice to be a dictator, but it takes too much time, so in order to
try and reduce this load, I'd like to dilute my dictatorship a bit.

To a large extent, this has already been the case, but I think it's
worth stating it more formally: if Glenn, Eli, Richard, Yidong, Handa, or
Jan agrees with a change, then you don't need my agreement.
IOW you only need my opinion if none of them has an opinion or if
there's a disagreement.


        Stefan

Re: Maintainership

[Eric S. Raymond]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>:
> It's nice to be a dictator, but it takes too much time, so in order to
> try and reduce this load, I'd like to dilute my dictatorship a bit.
> 
> To a large extent, this has already been the case, but I think it's
> worth stating it more formally: if Glenn, Eli, Richard, Yidong, Handa, or
> Jan agrees with a change, then you don't need my agreement.
> IOW you only need my opinion if none of them has an opinion or if
> there's a disagreement.

OK.  The following question is *not* an attempt to be contentious; I'm
trying to figure out how this is supposed to work, and help everyone
else figure out too.

You have expressed "100% agreement" with a post objecting to me doing /etc
cleanup during feature freeze.

On the other hand, Richard has approved the idea and actively assisted.

If I understand your intention correctly, that makes the completion of
the /etc cleanup changes an approved project.  The alternative
interpretation is that Richard should take "100% agreement" as 
direction to stop helping me with it.

I can cheerfully live with either theory - I've certainly got enough
on my task list to occupy me for a while.  So I'm not pushing for either
outcome in particular, I just want to know how the decision procedure
works.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>

Re: Maintainership

[Jarek Czekalski]

W dniu 01/12/2014 04:23 AM, Stefan Monnier pisze:
> It's nice to be a dictator, but it takes too much time, so in order to
> try and reduce this load, I'd like to dilute my dictatorship a bit.
> [...]

Could you please put it down somewhere on project page? Otherwise this 
important statement would be hardly available. Currently the main 
project page (I mean at Savannah [1]) only says that there are 6 admins, 
nothing about your leading role.

Thanks
Jarek

[1] http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/emacs/

Re: Maintainership

[David Kastrup]

"Eric S. Raymond" <esr@thyrsus.com> writes:

> Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>:
>> It's nice to be a dictator, but it takes too much time, so in order to
>> try and reduce this load, I'd like to dilute my dictatorship a bit.
>> 
>> To a large extent, this has already been the case, but I think it's
>> worth stating it more formally: if Glenn, Eli, Richard, Yidong, Handa, or
>> Jan agrees with a change, then you don't need my agreement.
>> IOW you only need my opinion if none of them has an opinion or if
>> there's a disagreement.
>
> OK.  The following question is *not* an attempt to be contentious; I'm
> trying to figure out how this is supposed to work, and help everyone
> else figure out too.
>
> You have expressed "100% agreement" with a post objecting to me doing /etc
> cleanup during feature freeze.
>
> On the other hand, Richard has approved the idea and actively
> assisted.

Where is the conflict?  It's something that should be done but not
committed now.

> If I understand your intention correctly, that makes the completion of
> the /etc cleanup changes an approved project.

A project is one thing.  Committing a change to the release candidate is
another.

Now I don't want to rain on Stefan's parade, but that difference is
pretty much exactly why it makes sense that any particular release
branch is best served by a _single_ responsible person making the
calls.  After the consolidation period is considered reasonably
complete, the release branch is branched off and from that time on,
_only_ the version dictator will cherry-pick changes into that branch
until the actual release happens.

The problem with multiple parallel quality managers which are possibly
partly not fully dedicated to the release quality management means that
the quality threshold of changes to go in is worse than even the
individual minimum (since the feeling of shared responsibility lowers
the diligence even more).

> I can cheerfully live with either theory - I've certainly got enough
> on my task list to occupy me for a while.  So I'm not pushing for
> either outcome in particular, I just want to know how the decision
> procedure works.

With my usual pessimism, my guess would be "not".

-- 
David Kastrup

Re: Maintainership

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Sat, 11 Jan 2014 23:09:40 -0500
> From: "Eric S. Raymond" <esr@thyrsus.com>
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> You have expressed "100% agreement" with a post objecting to me doing /etc
> cleanup during feature freeze.

The objection is only to doing this on the trunk.  I suggest doing
this on a branch instead, then you can do whatever you like without
affecting anyone else (unless they want to be affected).

You can do that on a local branch, in which case the procedures are as
described on the Wiki, under "task branch" (whcih you are already
familiar with).  Or you can push that branch to Savannah, in which
case it becomes a public one, and will get converted into the git
mirror, so that both you and others can try it with git and/or with
bzr.  The Wiki describes how to push.

Then you can merge the branch onto the trunk when we all agree that
the time came for that.

P.S.  While you work on a branch, it is generally advisable to merge
from trunk once in a few days.  But since the trunk is in feature
freeze now, and until that freeze is over, you can do the merges much
less frequently.