Re: Gdb

[Russell Shaw <rjshaw@netspace.net.au>]

Daniel Jacobowitz wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 25, 2006 at 11:38:49PM +1000, Russell Shaw wrote:
> 
>>This makes touching anything unpredictable, as there's too many combinations
>>of possible code paths that may or may not be valid.
> 
> Guess what?  The conditions aren't orthogonal _for a reason_.
> 
> I don't think there's any point in my continuing this conversation, so
> this will probably be my last message.  You continue insisting that
> the complexity is unnecessary, and yet you don't know why it's there.
> I can assure you that it isn't there just to make our lives harder.
> 
>>It's undoable by anyone not intimately familiar with the code which
>>means weeks of prodding with a second gdb. The payoff is better in
>>making something totally different and new.
> 
> Having spent many days considering this, talking to others about it,
> and even starting it twice, I believe that you are wrong.
> 
> There's a lot of payoff in starting from scratch, but (A) you have to
> put in just about as much work, and (B) you end up with something
> totally different.  If that's your goal, congratulations (I'm thinking
> of Frysk here, for instance).  But if you wanted something that looked
> like GDB...

The amount of code is not what i mean. It's the organization that lacks
coherency. There's too many things tacked on half-heartedly knowing whether
that was the right thing to do or the right place to put it. So any patches
i submit could easily break something on some other system, and it's hard to
know.

I'll cut or re-arrange various steps i've seen (during "run"), but i won't
submit any patches for months (needs a lot of checking).

I was going to copy stuff starting from scratch, but that seems a bit of
effort after trying it. I'll just evolve the current gdb a bit.