[LLVMdev] RFC: Code Ownership

[Chris Lattner]

On Nov 12, 2012, at 9:32 AM, Chandler Carruth <chandlerc at google.com> wrote:
> Personally, the reason for this concern is the conflation of several
> independent roles into a single "code ownership" bucket:
> - What the development policy says: ensuring each patch gets some review.
> - What the release process follows: code owners get the final say in
> whether a patch gets cherry picked into a release.
> - What has happened in practice: code owners make decisions when there
> are two viable choices with differing pros and cons, but no clear
> consensus on which direction is preferred.

I think this is a good breakdown, but it is also listed in descending order of frequency.  The third occurrence is actually pretty rare, and no matter who the code owner is, these events are full of long discussions with many experts.

> I see two easy ways to avoid this issue:
> 
> 1) Split off the third point from code ownership. Have some other
> mechanism, which hopefully is not a single-point-of-failure (or
> success... ;]).

In my opinion, this is already true in practice, and the task is delegated to the general community at large.  This is the point of the discussion.

> 2) Require code owners to be at least one of the "trusted maintainers"
> of the area they own (to quote the dev policy).

Given that many of the "trusted maintainers" are not willing or able to be a code owner, I don't think this is a great solution.  It means that *I* end up de-facto owning everything, which isn't good for the community either.

-Chris