Re: Preparing for the GDB 5.0 / GDB 2000 / GDB2k release

[Franz Sirl <Franz dot Sirl-kernel at lauterbach dot com>]

>>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?

Well, the point is that there is a patch out there by Kevin Buettner that once
was done in late 4.16 I think. It wasn't applied for 4.17 for legal reasons
which have since then be resolved (post the 4.18 release). But since then
nothing has been checked in into CVS (which could be somehow understandable),
but also no intermediate work has been posted on gdb-patches :-(. Se we know
there's something out there that is being worked on, but we cannot take part in
development, because there's nothing we can iterate on! We can only sit and
wait in this situation, or? And I think it's quite understandable that we get a
bit "nervous" when a new release is announced without support for Linux/PPC. In
fact, if Kevin Hendricks wouldn't have been faster than me, I would have started
this discussion :-)).

I think Kevin Buettner should checkin his current status into CVS, so that
there is at least _something_ we can report bugs against and maybe even do some
fixes.

Franz.