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

[Stan Shebs]

Andrew Cagney wrote:

>> 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.

That's an interesting question.  Thinking about that, and comparing with
GCC experience, I'd say that in general it's just extremely difficult to
get infrastructural work accomplished in a small group or small company;
you'd have to have a sufficiently large and/or well-funded group that
the time taken by infrastructure does not affect the group's overall
schedule.

>
> 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.

I think we're in agreement on that.

>
> 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.

I'm very glad that Red Hat can manage it! Cygnus was much more of a
hand-to-mouth operation; if contract work didn't get delivered on time,
people had to be laid off. There was VC money later, but it mostly got
swallowed up by various unprofitable initiatives.

Stan