From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 29917 invoked by alias); 2 Oct 2003 05:31:23 -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 29907 invoked from network); 2 Oct 2003 05:31:22 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO localhost.redhat.com) (65.49.0.121) by sources.redhat.com with SMTP; 2 Oct 2003 05:31:22 -0000 Received: from redhat.com (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by localhost.redhat.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id E2C6F2B89; Thu, 2 Oct 2003 01:31:08 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: <3F7BB81C.6090403@redhat.com> Date: Thu, 02 Oct 2003 05:31:00 -0000 From: Andrew Cagney User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; NetBSD macppc; en-US; rv:1.0.2) Gecko/20030820 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Stan Shebs Cc: Eli Zaretskii , gdb@sources.redhat.com Subject: Re: Features vs infrastructure (was Re: Tracepoint support in Cygnus GDB ?) References: <3F717475.33E13BC4@india.hp.com> <6654-Wed24Sep2003201904+0300-eliz@elta.co.il> <3F72FF8C.3080104@redhat.com> <6654-Sat27Sep2003132618+0300-eliz@elta.co.il> <3F75A491.4010203@redhat.com> <1659-Sat27Sep2003204134+0300-eliz@elta.co.il> <3F75D8D3.2090207@redhat.com> <2427-Sun28Sep2003102631+0300-eliz@elta.co.il> <3F76EC92.6010005@redhat.com> <4098-Sun28Sep2003234119+0300-eliz@elta.co.il> <3F775F6C.8070209@redhat.com> <3F784618.50203@redhat.com> <3F7B4BEC.1060800@apple.com> <3F7B9B85.50201@redhat.com> <3F7B9FEF.6070600@apple.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-SW-Source: 2003-10/txt/msg00048.txt.bz2 > Andrew Cagney wrote: > > Heh, I've been trolled! :-) I must say, I've been a little envious > watching GDB development over the past couple of years; Cygnus was never > able to afford so many cycles spent on internals. For multi-arch alone > it took over three years from initial proposal to the actual hacking... ... > You sound dubious... But in 1995 I drew up a document listing a bunch > of directions for Cygnus to pursue with GDB, presented them at every > quarterly meeting, and management would smile and nod and not make > any promises. Multi-arch even got onto the future work schedule > a couple times, but then contracts came in and bumped it off again. > The 1995 doc is presumably still officially RH confidential, but > perhaps you could get somebody over there to approve posting it; it > would be a useful window into a less-well-known era of GDB history. Do you accept that, in hindsite, such an approach was doomed to failure? Mgt could never buy into such large infrastructure investments and, hence, were paying you lip service. Even when you did get multi-arch onto the scheduled, the work got cut short. multi-arch continues to be finished by other means. Rather than looking at features and infrastructure as adversaries, think of them as mutual friends. One works off the other. A simplification of the code here, leads to a simpler/faster/correct implementation of a feature there. During that period, Cygnus failed to recognize such benefits, and as a consequence, swandered an oportunity to do infrastructure work for free. Fortunatly, that has since changed. Andrew