Re: Let core developers "vote" to accept patches.

[Yoshinori K. Okuji]

On Tuesday 15 August 2006 00:37, Johan Rydberg wrote:
> In other projects that I've worked on, we've used a system where the
> core developers can either give a +1 or a -1 on a contributed patch.
> If a patch receives two +1's or more, it is accepted (if there are no
> -1's) and committed by one of the developers.

You can vote for a patch, but I'm not planning to apply "majority rule" to 
GRUB. As you can see in various countries, majority-based decisions do not 
always work very well. I rather believe in aristocracy in software 
development.

Our rules are:

- When you are a committer and a patch is trivial enough, you can (and should) 
check in the patch by yourself.

- If not, you should ask others in grub-devel.

- I retain final words as the designer of GRUB 2. For some certain parts, I 
completely rely on other developers. For instance, Hollis would even precede 
me in PowerPC-specific changes.

- If a change is involved with political issues, official maintainers must 
approve or disapprove. This is required for the GNU Project.

Our way is mostly trust-based, and authority-based for important decisions. I 
do not think this way is working badly.

Okuji