[maint] The GDB maintenance process

[Daniel Jacobowitz]

On Thu, Feb 20, 2003 at 08:55:21AM +0200, Zaretskii Eli wrote:
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> > From: Daniel Berlin [mailto:dberlin@dberlin.org] 
> > Sent: Wednesday, February 19, 2003 3:24 PM
> > 
> > > I guess I just don't see this to be as much of a problem as  others
> do.
> > > For one thing, with the higher entropy level, more development
> actually
> > > happens.
> > Bingo.
> > I don't think we should stall development (and in the 
> > extreme,  even if 
> > it means we can't make quality releases any day of the year) because 
> > mistakes occasionally happen in patches, or because not every 
> > maintainer in existence has said something about a patch.  That's a 
> > recipe for no progress.
> 
> For some definition of ``progress''.
> 
> Who said that adding code at a faster rate at the price of having more
> bugs is more ``progress'' than what we have now?  There are people out
> there who need GDB to actually do something _useful_, not just to debug
> and/or develop GDB itself, you know.  What about frustration of those
> GDB users when their favorite feature is broken by some
> committed-before-review patch that adds a hot new feature?  Does that
> ever count?

I wouldn't have suggested this if I really thought that would happen.

> Does anyone remember that latest GCC releases are practically unusable
> for any production-quality work due to bugs?  Does anyone even care?

And for the record, while I'd say that was true for 3.0, it was _not_
true for 3.1 or 3.2 or 3.2.1/3.2.2, which I consider production quality
compilers; and it won't be true for 3.3 either.

> Of course, if contributors are frustrated by the slow review rate, let's
> try to improve that (see my other mail).  But let's not obscure our view
> of the problem by discussing abstract issues of ``progress''.  An
> official release every 3 months is more than enough progress for my
> taste.

Not if there's nothing much new in it.  Which is a bit of an
exaggeration, before anyone calls me on it - but still pretty well
expresses my point.

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz
MontaVista Software                         Debian GNU/Linux Developer