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Re: GDB transition to GPLv3 should now be complete
On Fri, Aug 24, 2007 at 08:11:17PM +0200, Mark Kettenis wrote:
> Well, the problem with this diff is that it actually seems to be a
> good idea until you actually start to use it. I thought it was a good
> idea, so I put it in my tree. And I threw it out again after a few
> days because I was annoyed by the fact that it didn't print strings as
> strings in many cases where I was sure it did before. As I said, the
> use of "unsigned char *" is very common in string manipulation code.
The diff from July, right? I wish you'd mentioned that you'd tried
it, back after I posted it - I would have been glad to see specific
examples. I still would, if you remember any of them.
There are at least three classes of code affected by this:
- uses MMX, SSE, or AltiVec
- uses unsigned char * for numerical data
- uses unsigned char * for strings
I've spent hours searching through different bodies of code trying to
come up with comparisons here (which I posted during the last
discussion). I believe that the first is rapidly increasingly and the
other two are about even. I don't want to drop what I believe to be a
very useful change without at least finding some compromise.
By the way, Jan's patch (which only applies to unsigned char[] and not
unsigned char *, leaving GDB in my opinion inconsistent) is in Fedora
7. That's relatively recent but has a lot of users; I don't see any
complaints about it in their bugzilla.
--
Daniel Jacobowitz
CodeSourcery