Re: gdb@gnu.org Discussion

[Stan Shebs <shebs at apple dot com>]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> 
> With all due respect to the GCC steering committee and the job it
> performs, I'd like to point out that the GDB development team has
> quite a different style of making decisions than the GCC team.  The
> most prominent evidence to the difference in style is the relatively
> high number of discussions on GCC-related forums where people get
> flamed or treated with vitriol, for no good reason, while discussing
> design issues; such incidents are practically absent from GDB forums.
> 'Nuff said.

An interesting insight, I've been ruminating on it.

I think the differences are mainly due to individual personalities;
at the risk of angering *everybody* by generalizing :-) , I'll observe
that GCC developers have tended to be more abrasive online than GDB
developers.  This has been the case for a long time, at least since 1993,
when I started at Cygnus fulltime.  Indeed, the GCC committee has
helped to tone this down, by publicly reining in people who've gone
out of bounds; on the old gcc2 list, there were few expectations
of civility, and things would get pretty hot regularly.

Discussion style is one thing that's under our collective control,
independent of maintainers, committees, etc.  If we each commit 
ourselves to not flame, and to respond temperately to flames by others,
the overall tone of the discussion will always be civil.

Stan