Re: Maintenance of top-level files

On Wed, Sep 08, 2021 at 09:23:49AM +0100, Andrew Burgess wrote:
> My question then, is what are peoples thoughts on how these files
> should be managed?

The question I take it really is:  Who has authority to approve
patches, and at least some responsibility to respond to bug reports
related to these files?

I don't think we (binutils + gdb) should take the position that these
files are owned by gcc, and thus authority and responsibility fall to
the listed gcc build machinery maintainers.  That doesn't seem fair or
reasonable.  The situation with top level files is very different to
say, libiberty, where binutils+gdb is unlikely to want changes that
are completely uninteresting to gcc.  With top level config*, Make*,
libtool.m4, lt* and so on we often want changes that aren't
interesting to gcc, and vice versa.  A model where changes are
installed first into one repository and then backported to the other
makes sense, I think.

So do we want someone appointed top-level build machinery maintainer
in binutils+gdb?  If so, I nominate Simon Marchi if he's interested.
Why Simon?  Because in digging through top-level logs, he's the most
recent (2018) person to act as a maintainer of those files, commit
d0ac1c4488.  Before that, there was Ralf Wildenhues in 2010.

> Are we going to try and get back in step with gcc?

I think we should try to do that.  

-- 
Alan Modra
Australia Development Lab, IBM