But, I do not think that this is the right solution. There are too many chefs trying to cook different stews, and trying to serve it as a single dish; and some only taking up space. I think the only way to go forward is to remove maintainers, and get one or two people. It will always be that Roland and Bushenll are the ones who decide what goes into the tree. And as long as this persists, the Hurd will not move forward.
It doesn't have to work that way. Another maintainer could install fixes if they don't respond. But we do need a good volunteer for the job; someone who is skilled both technically and with people. I am probobly the only logical candidate, I know both the libc side, and the Hurd side very well. And I have yet to hear complaints about me maintaining inetutils, the Hurdy bits in GDB, etc. Ofcourse, there are always some people that will always be unhappy. In either case, I am more than happy to voluenteer, the Hurd and glibc are one of the few project I simply adore. But, I cannot agree to the `if they don't respond', it isn't just about fixes, it is about bigger changes as well and general direction of the whole project. And as it is, the people who are currently maintainers are far too busy with other things and have not had any time for the past +7 years to set any direction so we have ended up with three `versions' of the Hurd: Hurd on GNU Mach, Hurd on L4, Hurd on unknown-kernel. There simply is not enough people to work on these many side projects, and new people joining the project get immensly confused on what exactly they should work on since everyone is saying `work on what you want'. It is a whole `no care attitude' which is simply destroying the project.