Re: MI rules

[Bob Rossi <bob at brasko dot net>]

On Thu, Sep 30, 2004 at 03:23:19PM +0200, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 22:59:59 -0400
> > From: Bob Rossi <bob@brasko.net>
> > Cc: gdb@sources.redhat.com, cagney@redhat.com, ezannoni@redhat.com,
> > 	fnasser@redhat.com
> > 
> > I have one quick note. I would prefer to get some cooperation with the
> > MI maintainers. I seriously need this cooperation in order to get
> > anything done with CGDB. Also, I consider the work I am doing necessary
> > for any front end developer to be able to write a reasonable front end
> > without having to heavily patch a version of GDB they distribute with.
> > 
> > If you consider my goal worthy, please at least respond with some
> > reasonable criticism so that these issues can be resolved. I feel that in
> > many ways my views on the MI are mostly ignored by the MI maintainers.
> 
> Out of those who are marked in MAINTAINERS as "MI maintainers" you can
> probably hope to get response only from Andrew, and Andrew has lots of
> other responsibilities and things to do.  So I'm not surprised you
> feel the way you do.

I'm glad this is understood. My question is, why do they other
maintainers not "maintain"? Or is responding to the community not
part of being a maintainer?

> However, the issues you worry about need not wait for the ``MI
> maintainers'' to respond, quite a few (if not most) of them are
> general enough to be discussed with all the global maintainers, some
> of whom are more responsive.

OK, I appreciate this advice.

> So I'd suggest to restructure the discussion so that more people could
> give you feedback.  Speaking for myself, one of the more significants
> reasons that all but prevent my participation in the threads you start
> is that messages are very long, mix many different issues, and include
> both general concerns, such as MI syntax backwards compatibility, and
> low-level details, such as minor grammar optimizations.  (And on top
> of that, top-post style makes the messages even longer and harder to
> read for someone who, like myself, has only a couple dozen minutes on
> a random day to read them.)

I appreciate you pointing this out. In retrospect I can see that I am
not bringing up one problem at a time. I will attempt to change this
from here on in. Thanks for the advice.

> So how about if you start several separate threads, one each about a
> specific MI issue out of those which are general enough for the global
> maintainers to participate?  For example, this list:
> 
> > 1. Can the mainline version get tagged asyncronous commands at the least? 
> > I would prefer every command to have a tag.
> > 
> > 2. Can there be a discussion about backwards compatibility with MI
> > output commands. This involves several issues I can think of.
> >    1. removing fields from an MI output command
> >    2. changing the output of an MI output command
> >    3. Making the commands themselves be backwards compatible even
> >    between major releases. This essentially makes the MI output version
> >    useless.
> 
> already includes 2 separate issues that don't require too much
> MI-specific knowledge for any global maintainer to give you feedback.
> If you make the issues visible at the beginning, rather than buried at
> an end of a longish message, and keep different issues separate, I
> think we will have more hope to come to a consensus enough for you to
> craft a patch that has good chances to be accepted.

I will do this. I really appreciate your feedback. It is impossible for
me to self-correct the way I approach the mailing list, I first need to
know that there are problems. Thanks.

Bob Rossi