Dwarf2 Meeting Agenda, January 9, 2001, 10:30pst

[Michael Eager <eager at eagercon dot com>]

Our next Dwarf 2 Standards meeting will be at SGI on Tuesday, January 9,
2001, at 10:30am.

Following is the agenda.  I have taken the liberty of annotating
the agenda to better focus our discussion.  All of the agenda items 
are procedural and no technical discussion is planned.

****
****    If the committee believes that these questions can be adequately
****    considered via email, I would be happy to cancel the meeting.
****


IEEE-ISTO
=========

I have received draft documents from IEEE-ISTO.  They were delayed
for quite a while, lost in some email eddy.  They need to be modified
to be more appropriate to the Dwarf standards process.   ISTO would
like a logo for the Dwarf standard -- anyone have ideas?   (I can
recommend appropriate music -- "In the Hall of the Mountain King"
from Edvard Grieg's "Peer Gynt Suite".)  


INCOMPLETE PROPOSALS
====================

We have several incomplete proposals:

	991026.3   Duplicate Dwarf data deletion
	991108.2   C++ virtual functions
	991108.13  Unwinding stacks (DW_CFA)

I had an overdue action item to investigate GDB with respect to 
991108.13 and unwinding stacks on Sparc processors. I am unable to find
anything which relates to this.

All three of these incomplete proposals contain discussion about the
various areas, but lack specific proposals for changes to the Dwarf
standard.  Have I missed any updates or replacement proposals?  

Unless I hear additional information relating to these three proposals
I will list them as rejected by the committee.  


LATE PROPOSALS
==============

A proposal was submitted on Dec 13, 2000, which addresses an issue 
related to discontiguous scopes or possible defect in the prior 
proposals on this issue.  This proposal appears to modify or depend
upon proposal 001101.1 which was rejected, or 001130.1 which is 
discussed below.

In September, we established a time frame for finalizing the Dwarf 
standard.  Although we did not establish a firm deadline for submission 
of proposals, we did establish a target date of Jan 1, 2001, for 
"All issues resolved and proposals considered".  I believe that this
proposal (and any others yet to be received) are beyond any reasonable
date for submissions.


DISCONTIGUOUS SCOPES
====================

There have been numerous proposals regarding discontiguous scopes:
	
	000531.1	Withdrawn
	000914.1	Accepted
	001101.1	Rejected 
	001130.1	No action
	Dec 13, 2000	Not accepted 

Proposal 001101.1 indicates that there are flaws in 000914.1 as accepted.
  
My current reading of this is that we have accepted a flawed proposal, 
rejected one proposed revision, and have little support for another revision
(or perhaps two).  At this juncture, I see several choices:

  1) Reconsider 000914.1 and confirm that it is accepted in its current state.
  2) Reconsider 000914.1 and reject it based on the flaws noted.
  3) Consider one or more modifications to 000914.1.

None of the several proposals represents an effort to standardize current
practice by any supplier.  We seem to be in a mode of successive modification,
refinement and correction to an undemonstrated methodology.

My view is that this issue is not ripe and that our acceptance of 000914.1 
was not adequately considered.  My recommendation is that we reconsider 
000914.1 and reject it with the recommendation that the submitter 
implement it as a user extension to Dwarf 2.


OTHER ISSUES
============

Documentation:  plans for document review and public distribution.

Version:  I plan to submit a proposal on version numbering.

-- 
Michael Eager	 Eager Consulting     eager@eagercon.com
1960 Park Blvd., Palo Alto, CA 94306  650-325-8077