From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 8673 invoked by alias); 2 Oct 2002 17:22:38 -0000 Mailing-List: contact gdb-patches-help@sources.redhat.com; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: gdb-patches-owner@sources.redhat.com Received: (qmail 8552 invoked from network); 2 Oct 2002 17:22:37 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO mail-out1.apple.com) (17.254.0.52) by sources.redhat.com with SMTP; 2 Oct 2002 17:22:37 -0000 Received: from mailgate1.apple.com (A17-128-100-225.apple.com [17.128.100.225]) by mail-out1.apple.com (8.11.3/8.11.3) with ESMTP id g92HMbi12935 for ; Wed, 2 Oct 2002 10:22:37 -0700 (PDT) Received: from scv3.apple.com (scv3.apple.com) by mailgate1.apple.com (Content Technologies SMTPRS 4.2.5) with ESMTP id ; Wed, 2 Oct 2002 10:22:29 -0700 Received: from apple.com (vpn-scv-x1-68.apple.com [17.219.193.68]) by scv3.apple.com (8.11.3/8.11.3) with ESMTP id g92HMZ317899; Wed, 2 Oct 2002 10:22:35 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: <3D9B2B10.40507@apple.com> Date: Wed, 02 Oct 2002 10:22:00 -0000 From: Stan Shebs User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20020826 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Keith Seitz CC: Jim Ingham , Andrew Cagney , gdb-patches@sources.redhat.com Subject: Re: [patch rfa:doco rfc:NEWS] mi1 -> mi2; rm mi0 References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-SW-Source: 2002-10/txt/msg00058.txt.bz2 Keith Seitz wrote: > > >As far as the versioning thing goes, I must say that I don't really care, >(not that my opinion matters), but I can understand why some on this list >would be less sympathetic with objections to dropping mi0 coming from >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. > > If you're saying it, then there are probably others thinking it, and so I'll respond that this is both unfair and ignorant. Apple is the only major system vendor using GCC and GDB as their primary development tools, and we have a set of considerations not seen by GNU/Linux, Cisco, HP, etc. For instance, we have massive legacy, both from NeXT and from the old MacOS world. We also have hundreds of fulltime engineers who can't get their jobs done if GDB doesn't, say, display a thread local variable correctly. We also have to provide tools for external developers coming from the various existing Mac environments, such as MPW and CW, many of them have expectations vastly different than what GNU traditionally provides, and if you tell them "tough", then they stop developing for the Mac, which is not acceptable. I've dealt with this for a couple years in the GCC context, and the situation is that even if we were to offer every single local change, many of them would be turned down, which means that we always have a constant overhead time to maintain our changes, depending on the churn in FSF code. So when we have to deal with gratuitous change, that eats into the time that could have been spent making patches for submission. It's a real chicken-and-egg problem, and in the compiler group we've been fortunate in having extra people to do some of this work while still meeting our other obligations. So let's all stay honest and aboveboard about what we're all doing and why, and in turn not impugn the motives and activities of our colleagues. We can accomplish a lot more working with rather than against each other. Stan