RE: [maint] The GDB maintenance process

Zaretskii Eli
2003-02-20T20:11:21Z

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> From: Daniel Berlin [mailto:dberlin@dberlin.org]
> Sent: Wednesday, February 19, 2003 3:24 PM
>
> > I guess I just don't see this to be as much of a problem as others
do.
> > For one thing, with the higher entropy level, more development
actually
> > happens.
> Bingo.
> I don't think we should stall development (and in the
> extreme, even if
> it means we can't make quality releases any day of the year) because
> mistakes occasionally happen in patches, or because not every
> maintainer in existence has said something about a patch. That's a
> recipe for no progress.

For some definition of ``progress''.

Who said that adding code at a faster rate at the price of having more
bugs is more ``progress'' than what we have now? There are people out
there who need GDB to actually do something _useful_, not just to debug
and/or develop GDB itself, you know. What about frustration of those
GDB users when their favorite feature is broken by some
committed-before-review patch that adds a hot new feature? Does that
ever count?

Does anyone remember that latest GCC releases are practically unusable
for any production-quality work due to bugs? Does anyone even care?

I say thanks God for slower development of GDB. At least I can _debug_
buggy code produced by buggy development tools ;-)

Of course, if contributors are frustrated by the slow review rate, let's
try to improve that (see my other mail). But let's not obscure our view
of the problem by discussing abstract issues of ``progress''. An
official release every 3 months is more than enough progress for my
taste.

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