Re: [FYI] Inlining support, rough patch

Stan Shebs
2009-04-23T05:56:05Z

Mark Kettenis wrote:
> That said, the proper response from me would be to hack up something
> closer to what the right solution would be. But I'm afraid I simply
> don't have the motivation to do such a thing anymore. The environment
> in which GDB is being developed seems to have changed. It feels like
> I'm the only one who is still hacking on code for fun, and that I'm
> being surrounded by people for which writing GDB code is their job.
> It sometimes feels like most of the effort goes into supporting
> debugging embedded targets hosted on non-free operating systems.
I think that's a little unfair. Red Hat and IBM people are doing only
Linux of course, and the majority of CodeSourcery's GDB work is
targeting either Linux or bare metal. What non-free operating systems
are you thinking of? DICOS? I'm looking at gdb/NEWS, and that's the only
non-free OS I'm seeing that has gotten any work at all in the past
several years. If anything, proprietary OS support is a rapidly
dwindling part of GDB work, certainly far less than it was in the 1990s,
when much time went into handling the combined idiosyncrasies of HP/UX,
Solaris, AIX, OSF/1, Irix, etc.

As for people hacking for fun vs pay, I don't really know how much
that's changed. In 1999, when we moved to a public repository, it was a
little bit of an act of faith that contributors were going to show up,
because prior to that almost of the GDB hacking was done by Cygnus
employees on the clock, and the patch submissions I received were almost
all related to the submitters' jobs. So if there was a golden age of
hacking GDB for fun, it had to be either before 1994 when I started with
it, or after 2000.

But to speak to motivation, if you're burned out on GDB, for whatever
reason, then take a break and kick back! I've spent 25 years - most of
my adult life - working on free software. I've been enthused, and burnt
out, and enthused again, multiple times. One of the beauties of the
large collaborative project is that any one of us can go do something
else for a while, and the project keeps right on going. In fact, that's
one way for participation to become non-fun, when we start to feel
indispensable, or like the sole gatekeeper for a part of the system, and
we feel like we have to do things out of necessity rather than free
choice. So each of us should self-monitor, and if we're starting to feel
stressed, disengage a bit and trust that our colleagues will carry on.

Stan