From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 29362 invoked by alias); 2 Oct 2003 06:42:10 -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 29334 invoked from network); 2 Oct 2003 06:42:10 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO mail-out3.apple.com) (17.254.13.22) by sources.redhat.com with SMTP; 2 Oct 2003 06:42:10 -0000 Received: from mailgate1.apple.com (a17-128-100-225.apple.com [17.128.100.225]) by mail-out3.apple.com (8.12.10/8.12.9) with ESMTP id h926g9vd024124 for ; Wed, 1 Oct 2003 23:42:09 -0700 (PDT) Received: from scv2.apple.com (scv2.apple.com) by mailgate1.apple.com (Content Technologies SMTPRS 4.2.1) with ESMTP id ; Wed, 1 Oct 2003 23:41:40 -0700 Received: from apple.com (vpn-scv-x1-8.apple.com [17.219.193.8]) by scv2.apple.com (8.12.9/8.12.9) with ESMTP id h926fvWI026539; Wed, 1 Oct 2003 23:41:57 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: <3F7BC8C6.7010601@apple.com> Date: Thu, 02 Oct 2003 06:42:00 -0000 From: Stan Shebs User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Andrew Cagney 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> <3F7BB81C.6090403@redhat.com> In-Reply-To: <3F7BB81C.6090403@redhat.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-SW-Source: 2003-10/txt/msg00053.txt.bz2 Andrew Cagney wrote: >> 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. That's an interesting question. Thinking about that, and comparing with GCC experience, I'd say that in general it's just extremely difficult to get infrastructural work accomplished in a small group or small company; you'd have to have a sufficiently large and/or well-funded group that the time taken by infrastructure does not affect the group's overall schedule. > > 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. I think we're in agreement on that. > > 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. I'm very glad that Red Hat can manage it! Cygnus was much more of a hand-to-mouth operation; if contract work didn't get delivered on time, people had to be laid off. There was VC money later, but it mostly got swallowed up by various unprofitable initiatives. Stan