From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 29135 invoked by alias); 8 Jan 2004 19:42:13 -0000 Mailing-List: contact gdb-help@sources.redhat.com; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: gdb-owner@sources.redhat.com Received: (qmail 29127 invoked from network); 8 Jan 2004 19:42:12 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO blount.mail.mindspring.net) (207.69.200.226) by sources.redhat.com with SMTP; 8 Jan 2004 19:42:12 -0000 Received: from user-119a90a.biz.mindspring.com ([66.149.36.10] helo=berman.michael-chastain.com) by blount.mail.mindspring.net with esmtp (Exim 3.33 #1) id 1Aeg2X-0005iy-00; Thu, 08 Jan 2004 14:41:57 -0500 Received: by berman.michael-chastain.com (Postfix, from userid 502) id D29734B35A; Thu, 8 Jan 2004 14:42:00 -0500 (EST) To: cagney@gnu.org, mec.gnu@mindspring.com Subject: Re: Proposal: obsolete target hppa*-hp-hpux10.* Cc: brobecker@act-europe.fr, dave@hiauly1.hia.nrc.ca, gdb@sources.redhat.com Message-Id: <20040108194200.D29734B35A@berman.michael-chastain.com> Date: Thu, 08 Jan 2004 19:42:00 -0000 From: mec.gnu@mindspring.com (Michael Elizabeth Chastain) X-SW-Source: 2004-01/txt/msg00094.txt.bz2 ac> Can I guess that you're, at least in part, working on 11.11 because it ac> is a stable PA RISC based platform and offers a path for getting ac> GNU/Linux PA out of limbo? Stand back, I'm gonna vent ... Well, no. My original motivation was that there's a lot of code in the test suite which is HP-specific. gdb.cp/local.exp has all these cases for HP compilers and I can't touch them. Now I can touch them. funcargs.exp had twenty-three instances of "if { $hp_cc_compiler } { setup_xfail hppa*-hp-hpux* }". funcargs.exp now has zero instances of "$hp_cc_compiler". Same for gdb itself. You ran gcov and there were a lot of files not covered. The problem is particularly acute for the symtab readers. As I write this, I'm working on a gcov version (thanks Elena Z for her message of 2003-01-06, which makes it really easy) so I can take care of deprecation in hpread.c and somread.c. I'd like to get on alphaev*-*-osf5.1 as well. Anything with a vendor compiler. It's all about code coverage. My long term plan is: . gdb includes a list of supported configurations . each supported configuration gets regression tested regularly . the test results get posted to gdb-testers@ . somebody reviews the results before each release (Also, after I started this work, I realized that it fits another, more personal goal). I don't care about hppa*-*-linux. It's low priority for the future, too. As I understand it, HP is phasing out hppa architecture in favor of ia64. Their transition will take several more years and I do want to support hppa*-hp-hpux* for several more years. But hppa boxes are going away. Back in the early days of GNU software, there was a hand-me-down mentality, or a bootstrap mentality if you prefer. We took whatever machines we could get, suffered with the vendor OS and the vendor shell, and bootstrapped a partial GNU system on them. Even our release process still has a "sun4" buried in it. (I thought that was funny a year ago when I noticed it. Now it's a release show-stopper). But the Penguin is here. My system is open source starting from the first block that the BIOS reads from the hard disk. So is yours, probably. And it's cheap. And it's high quality. If I want another GNU system, it takes me 1-3 days to work and earn money and buy another i686-pc-linux-gnu system. It would take me much longer to configure a working hppa*-*-linux system even if the hardware was *free*, because I hear that there are bugs in hppa*-*-linux where gdb crashes the kernel, and someone has to fix those bugs. We are no longer in the days when machines cost two months of an engineer's salary and the way to get a GNU system was to scrounge a hand-me-down machine and port GNU to it. Now the way to get a GNU system is to spend a few day's salary and stick in a CD. I can't choose other people's goals and priorities, but I think that hppa*-*-linux is a hobby and will not help with world domination, and the Debian hppa/linux distro is a waste of time. It's many engineer months for a system that O(10) or O(100) people will run and they are short of engineer months for their other goals with Sarge. But it's their goals, their choice. Just my opinion. Contrast with C++. Look what's written in C++: Mozilla, Open Office, KDE, Cygwin. Our prospects in the desktop war depend on C++ apps, and gdb support for C++ is a weak link in the development chain. And yes, I know that I'm personal-computer-centric. That's my bias. But even after that bias, I think that Linux in the workstation and server market is a lot more interesting when the vendor actively sells and supports it. And maybe I'm completely wrong about this and HP actively supports hppa*-*-linux, they give the developers all the internal docs that they need, and sell a lot of hppa*-*-linux, the way IBM sells linux. Michael C