Re: Rewriting the type system

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@is.elta.co.il>]

On 11 Jun 2001, Daniel Berlin wrote:

> Even the very simple patch to add the misc obstack to the objfiles,
> and stop putting things in the psymbol obstack that don't belong, from
> May 29th, hasn't been reviewed yet.
> Hell, the simple bcache change i submitted last year (updating the
> starting constant, fix the indenting) still hasn't
> been reviewed.
> 
> Jim, GDB development is moving a lot slower than it should.

My experience is very different.  Every change that I suggested until
now, for the past 2 years or so that I'm involved with GDB
maintenance, was usually reviewed within 1-2 weeks of my posting it
as an RFA.  A few times I needed to post a reminder (I usually do that
after more than a week's passed without any replies).  A couple of
times, I needed more than one reminder, but that's an exception rather
than the rule, in my experience.

In most cases, I had my patches reviewed and approved in 2-3 weeks,
sometimes a month.  In one exceptional case, it took 3 or 4 months,
but that was my first large submission, and I failed to ping the
relevant maintainer more than once.

So GDB development is not slow, in my opinion.  More importantly, I'm
always able to get my patches accepted by using the normal channels,
such as pinging people from time to time.

In other words, the development procedures work.

> If someone told me, after just rewriting the typesystem, that i
> needed to redo it from scratch, i'd probably just start making my
> own GDB releases instead (in effect, forking GDB).

As I already wrote elsewhere, if you care about GDB, please stop
talking about a fork, because even talking about it can do a
tremendous damage to the nice cooperative development atmosphere we
have in GDB.  I've been and am involved in quite a few other free
software packages, and I'm telling you that GDB is one of the nicest,
most cooperative environments I had ever experienced.  Please, let's
cherish that!

While there's always place for improvement, let's suggest such
improvements in a constructive way, and let's assume that everybody in
this fine forum has the same goal: making GDB better.  Offending
people by talking about a fork is not a good way, to say the least, of
asking them to be more responsive to your submissions.  It _is_,
however, an efficient way of making cooperation harder.

(I'm sorry about lecturing, but I cannot in good faith look the other
way when people talk about forking.)