Re: [patch rfa:doco rfc:NEWS] mi1 -> mi2; rm mi0

Jason Molenda
2002-10-02T06:25:14Z

On Tue, Oct 01, 2002 at 04:42:28PM -0700, Keith Seitz wrote:

> <devil's advocate>
>[...]
> Apple, who has done a lot of work on gdb and MI; no doubt fixed a lot of
> stuff, but only managed to "submit" a giant distribution tarball of their
> modified GDB. I wouldn't be too suprised if some thought that Apple was
> taking advantage of the public's work. Mind you, I'm not saying that any
> of this is true, but I wouldn't be suprised if some one reading this list
> felt that way.
> </devil's advocate>

This is definitely off-topic and I should just let it go... But this
isn't a fair representation of reality. I think Keith knows it, and
I think all the gdb folks who know Jim know it. The gdb group at
Apple is not large and has had tremendous struggles to get gdb working
correctly for its developers on the MacOS X platform -- there has
been literally no time left over. Apple management is very supportive
of moving our fixes, enhancements and changes to the FSF as much
as possible -- as anyone would sensibly be -- but it's a simple matter
of not having the time to make it happen so far.

As for the source dump, you know very well that Andrew asked for
that, and I provided it right away. (Incidentally, I'm not one of
these hard-working Apple gdb programmers, and even I couldn't find
time to make up the original tarball until a weekend.)

I think you can see Apple's committment to working with the free
software community in gcc more easily -- we've got more people
working on the compiler there and it is an obvious priority to
participate in the compiler's development and enhancement. The
compiler and debugger groups are under the same management
structure - they're clued in that this is a necessary way to
operate in the long term.

Back in the day, Cygnus was periodically flamed for being evil
software hoarders by various unclueful people because we weren't
releasing our local changes in the timeframe or manner that the
flamers wanted us to. Keith, you should know better.

Jason