Re: GDB transition to GPLv3 should now be complete

[Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@false.org>]

On Fri, Aug 24, 2007 at 08:11:17PM +0200, Mark Kettenis wrote:
> Well, the problem with this diff is that it actually seems to be a
> good idea until you actually start to use it.  I thought it was a good
> idea, so I put it in my tree.  And I threw it out again after a few
> days because I was annoyed by the fact that it didn't print strings as
> strings in many cases where I was sure it did before.  As I said, the
> use of "unsigned char *" is very common in string manipulation code.

The diff from July, right?  I wish you'd mentioned that you'd tried
it, back after I posted it - I would have been glad to see specific
examples.  I still would, if you remember any of them.

There are at least three classes of code affected by this:

  - uses MMX, SSE, or AltiVec
  - uses unsigned char * for numerical data
  - uses unsigned char * for strings

I've spent hours searching through different bodies of code trying to
come up with comparisons here (which I posted during the last
discussion).  I believe that the first is rapidly increasingly and the
other two are about even.  I don't want to drop what I believe to be a
very useful change without at least finding some compromise.

By the way, Jan's patch (which only applies to unsigned char[] and not
unsigned char *, leaving GDB in my opinion inconsistent) is in Fedora
7.  That's relatively recent but has a lot of users; I don't see any
complaints about it in their bugzilla.

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz
CodeSourcery