This is the mail archive of the
gdb@sourceware.cygnus.com
mailing list for the GDB project.
Re: Preparing for the GDB 5.0 / GDB 2000 / GDB2k release
- To: khendricks at admin dot ivey dot uwo dot ca, gdb at sourceware dot cygnus dot com
- Subject: Re: Preparing for the GDB 5.0 / GDB 2000 / GDB2k release
- From: "Daniel Berlin" <dan at cgsoftware dot com>
- Date: Tue, 08 Feb 2000 17:22:57 -0500
- Reply-To: dan at cgsoftware dot com
>
>What you are really saying here is that is better *not* to get
something into
>the tree that everyone can hack at and evenutully get to work. Instead
we never
>incorporate and hope for some miracle that it gets fixed.?.?.?
>
What you are really saying is that it's better to put hacks and crap in
the tree, and hope someone comes along and does it right, removing the
hack, while making it even more a living hell for everyone else to
understand.
>That logic is so completely flawed, that I am surprised you are
defending it.
So is yours.
>
>We, the ppc people, have seen 4.16.97, 4.17.X, 4.18.X, and now 5.X come
(or
>coming) without support because of this "don't break anything
mentality".
>
That's not why at all.
You haven't seen support because nobody wants to do it right.
>Simply put isn't it just *better* to get in something and let the users
help to
>clean it up, make it work, improve it. As a professor of TQM, waiting
for
>perfection is just not the way to achieve it. Getting everyone
involved is.
See, here is your fatal mistake.
You are making the assumption that users will clean it up, make it work,
and improve it.
While this may be true in other projects, it's not really true in GDB's
case.
In fact, it's only true in GCC's case because there are more people who
understand the intricacies of compilers, and who are qualified to hack
on the compiler, than their are who understand the intricacies of joe
random platform's debugger interface.
When it comes to things like drivers and debuggers, users don't really
help much, unless the architecture is so amazingly easy to understand
it's absurd. Which it isn't. Having ported sound drivers and whatnot to
BeOS, and talked with quite a few authors of sound drivers on linux, the
general consensus is that nobody submits patches. Their is the
occasional person who really enjoys hacking on undocumented hardware, or
poorly documented debugger interfaces, and who submits patches, but they
are very very rare.
So what about the non-platform specific parts of GDB that are
understandable, and hackable?
well, for the most part, they work great, and people are happy with
them, and thus don't submit patches.
But just ot prove my point, when is the last time you saw a user submit
a patch for dwarf2 support, or C++ overload resolution (discounting me),
or support for a new platform?
It just doesn't happen all that often.
Accepting hackish patches won't change this. It's not going to mean
random people are going to start submitting more patches. It'll just
mean one more hack in the tree (Although the patch is starting to shape
up), and one more hack for the occasional few who want to try to
comprehend how it works, to sort through.
--Dan
-----------------------------------
This message was sent with the demo version of Postmaster, a BeOS mail client.
For more information, please visit http://kennyc.com/postmaster