Re: x86 fpu

[Mark Kettenis <kettenis at wins dot uva dot nl>]

   From: jtc@redback.com (J.T. Conklin)
   Date: 21 Oct 1999 12:53:40 -0700

   >>>>> "H.J." == H J Lu <hjl@lucon.org> writes:
   >> I believe that H.J.'s private versions of the GNU toolchain have been
   >> a great disservice to both the GNU/Linux and the larger GNU community.

   H.J.> I certainly don't agree :-). It is a pain for me to maintain my
   H.J.> private versions. But I hate to see the Linux people nowhere to
   H.J.> go for help. Do you really honestly believe that a new official
   H.J.> version should be made whenever a serious Linux related bug is
   H.J.> fixed or we have to live with the bug which mainly affects Linux?

   No, I don't think that there needs to be a new official version when a
   serious bug is fixed; nor do I think that Linux users should live with
   bugs (Linux specific or not) until the next official release.

   I do think development snapshots could be made to serve the purpose of
   your private versions, or in the very worst case your private versions
   could would contain minimal changes over the most recent snapshot.

Yes!  The GDB maintainers and the Linux community (including HJ)
should make a serious effort to make this possible again.  That was
why I asked HJ what would need to happen before he would consider
dropping his 4.17 based fork.

   I believe this because in my experience it is extremely quick and easy
   get a well written patch to fix a bug into GDB, or any other toolchain
   component.  While not instantaneous, the week or two between the time
   a patch is submitted and the time it shows up in a snapshot is usually
   not unacceptable.  In those rare cases, I check the patch into our
   production repository at the same time I submit the patch; with full
   knowledge that I'll be responsible for tracking that divergence until
   the bug is fixed in the repository.

While this may be the situation right now, this has not always been
the case.  In the period after the official realease of gdb 4.17
development was pretty closed, snapshots were only available in a
"secret" directory on the cygnus ftp server and appeared very
irregualar.

While I agree with a lot of points you make in your message, I don't
think spelling them out again and again is a very constructive
approach.  Instead we should be writing code and see if we can get a
few more people from the Linux community to contribute to the
official GDB version, possibly by looking at the differences between
HJ's version and the current CVS version, breaking them up in tiny
patches, do some cleaning up and feeding them to the maintainers.

Mark