From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: "Daniel Berlin" To: khendricks@admin.ivey.uwo.ca, gdb@sourceware.cygnus.com Subject: Re: Preparing for the GDB 5.0 / GDB 2000 / GDB2k release Date: Sat, 01 Apr 2000 00:00:00 -0000 Message-id: <950048577_PM_BeOS.dan@cgsoftware.com> References: <200002082018.MAA12871@propylaea.anduin.com> X-SW-Source: 2000-q1/msg00176.html > >What you are really saying here is that is better *not* to get something into >the tree that everyone can hack at and evenutully get to work. Instead we never >incorporate and hope for some miracle that it gets fixed.?.?.? > What you are really saying is that it's better to put hacks and crap in the tree, and hope someone comes along and does it right, removing the hack, while making it even more a living hell for everyone else to understand. >That logic is so completely flawed, that I am surprised you are defending it. So is yours. > >We, the ppc people, have seen 4.16.97, 4.17.X, 4.18.X, and now 5.X come (or >coming) without support because of this "don't break anything mentality". > That's not why at all. You haven't seen support because nobody wants to do it right. >Simply put isn't it just *better* to get in something and let the users help to >clean it up, make it work, improve it. As a professor of TQM, waiting for >perfection is just not the way to achieve it. Getting everyone involved is. See, here is your fatal mistake. You are making the assumption that users will clean it up, make it work, and improve it. While this may be true in other projects, it's not really true in GDB's case. In fact, it's only true in GCC's case because there are more people who understand the intricacies of compilers, and who are qualified to hack on the compiler, than their are who understand the intricacies of joe random platform's debugger interface. When it comes to things like drivers and debuggers, users don't really help much, unless the architecture is so amazingly easy to understand it's absurd. Which it isn't. Having ported sound drivers and whatnot to BeOS, and talked with quite a few authors of sound drivers on linux, the general consensus is that nobody submits patches. Their is the occasional person who really enjoys hacking on undocumented hardware, or poorly documented debugger interfaces, and who submits patches, but they are very very rare. So what about the non-platform specific parts of GDB that are understandable, and hackable? well, for the most part, they work great, and people are happy with them, and thus don't submit patches. But just ot prove my point, when is the last time you saw a user submit a patch for dwarf2 support, or C++ overload resolution (discounting me), or support for a new platform? It just doesn't happen all that often. Accepting hackish patches won't change this. It's not going to mean random people are going to start submitting more patches. It'll just mean one more hack in the tree (Although the patch is starting to shape up), and one more hack for the occasional few who want to try to comprehend how it works, to sort through. --Dan ----------------------------------- This message was sent with the demo version of Postmaster, a BeOS mail client. For more information, please visit http://kennyc.com/postmaster