Time for a new release?

Time for a new release?

[Joel Brobecker]

Hello,

It's been almost 4 months since the last release (6.4). I was
unfortunately too busy lately to follow closely the GDB development.
I looked at the NEWS file, and see a few interesting thing there.
New commands, improved windows host support, etc.

Perhaps it is time to think about a new release? I'm thinking about
the following timeline:

        Branch: Apr 3rd
        Pre-release: Apr 5th
        Release: Apr 19th

Basically, a first pre-release a couple of days after branching.
And then the first release if all goes well two weeks after, to
give us some time to flush any issue we might find.

Also, do we want to distribute GDB with -Werror enabled? It's fair
to have us build GDB with -Werror, but I would feel more comfortable
distributing something that's easier to compiler for the end user.
I think this will avoid some traffic from users who don't know what
to do with the fatal warnings.

Thoughts?

-- 
Joel

Re: Time for a new release?

[Christopher Faylor]

On Tue, Mar 14, 2006 at 08:37:47PM -0800, Joel Brobecker wrote:
>It's been almost 4 months since the last release (6.4). I was
>unfortunately too busy lately to follow closely the GDB development.
>I looked at the NEWS file, and see a few interesting thing there.
>New commands, improved windows host support, etc.
>
>Perhaps it is time to think about a new release? I'm thinking about
>the following timeline:
>
>        Branch: Apr 3rd
>        Pre-release: Apr 5th
>        Release: Apr 19th
>
>Basically, a first pre-release a couple of days after branching.
>And then the first release if all goes well two weeks after, to
>give us some time to flush any issue we might find.
>
>Also, do we want to distribute GDB with -Werror enabled? It's fair
>to have us build GDB with -Werror, but I would feel more comfortable
>distributing something that's easier to compiler for the end user.
>I think this will avoid some traffic from users who don't know what
>to do with the fatal warnings.
>
>Thoughts?

Isn't this kind of email better suited for the gdb mailing list rather
than the gdb-patches mailing list?

FWIW, I am tracking down, in slow motion, a problem with the latest gdb
under cygwin where gdb SEGVs when stepping over some cygwin DLL
functions.

I don't think that's any reason to hold up a release unless this turns
out to be a generic problem.

cgf

Re: Time for a new release?

[Daniel Jacobowitz]

On Wed, Mar 15, 2006 at 12:01:17PM -0500, Christopher Faylor wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 14, 2006 at 08:37:47PM -0800, Joel Brobecker wrote:
> >It's been almost 4 months since the last release (6.4). I was
> >unfortunately too busy lately to follow closely the GDB development.
> >I looked at the NEWS file, and see a few interesting thing there.
> >New commands, improved windows host support, etc.
> >
> >Perhaps it is time to think about a new release? I'm thinking about
> >the following timeline:
> >
> >        Branch: Apr 3rd
> >        Pre-release: Apr 5th
> >        Release: Apr 19th

Sounds reasonable to me.  I know I have a lot of things coming up
that I don't want to sneak "under the wire" into a release - I'll
want to give them a lot of time to settle down.

> >Basically, a first pre-release a couple of days after branching.
> >And then the first release if all goes well two weeks after, to
> >give us some time to flush any issue we might find.

This is a pretty aggressive schedule; if we want the release to receive
broad testing, I recommend waiting a bit longer.

> >Also, do we want to distribute GDB with -Werror enabled? It's fair
> >to have us build GDB with -Werror, but I would feel more comfortable
> >distributing something that's easier to compiler for the end user.
> >I think this will avoid some traffic from users who don't know what
> >to do with the fatal warnings.

I agree.  Maybe some day it will be appropriate to ship GDB with
-Werror, but I'd rather not do it immediately.

> Isn't this kind of email better suited for the gdb mailing list rather
> than the gdb-patches mailing list?

Yes please.  I know a lot of people use gdb@ as the user list and
gdb-patches@ as the development list, but I've always considered
gdb-patches to be a list strictly about patches.

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz
CodeSourcery