Features vs infrastructure (was Re: Tracepoint support in Cygnus GDB ?)

[Andrew Cagney]

> Andrew Cagney wrote:
> 
> Heh, I've been trolled! :-)  I must say, I've been a little envious
> watching GDB development over the past couple of years; Cygnus was never
> able to afford so many cycles spent on internals. For multi-arch alone
> it took over three years from initial proposal to the actual hacking...

...

> You sound dubious... But in 1995 I drew up a document listing a bunch
> of directions for Cygnus to pursue with GDB, presented them at every
> quarterly meeting, and management would smile and nod and not make
> any promises.  Multi-arch even got onto the future work schedule
> a couple times, but then contracts came in and bumped it off again.
> The 1995 doc is presumably still officially RH confidential, but
> perhaps you could get somebody over there to approve posting it; it
> would be a useful window into a less-well-known era of GDB history.

Do you accept that, in hindsite, such an approach was doomed to failure? 
  Mgt could never buy into such large infrastructure investments and, 
hence, were paying you lip service.  Even when you did get multi-arch 
onto the scheduled, the work got cut short.  multi-arch continues to be 
finished by other means.

Rather than looking at features and infrastructure as adversaries, think 
of them as mutual friends.  One works off the other.  A simplification 
of the code here, leads to a simpler/faster/correct implementation of a 
feature there.

During that period, Cygnus failed to recognize such benefits, and as a 
consequence, swandered an oportunity to do infrastructure work for free.

Fortunatly, that has since changed.

Andrew