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Re: New GDB snapshot available



   Date: Mon, 08 Mar 1999 10:18:31 +0100
   From: Eric Paire <e.paire@opengroup.org>

   Do you really mean that there is a portable way of debugging user-level
   implementation of thread package ? If it is the case, then I don't
   understand why you accept a hpux-thread.c file in the gdb sources and
   not a linux-thread.c one (which I tried to develop without any processor
   dependencies, so that it should work with any Linux, but of course not
   with Solaris ;-).

The linux-thread.c part was not problematic.  In fact, native thread
support seems always to be very platform-specific, so it's most
sensible for that code to go into separate files.  However, the patch
I saw consisted of more than just the one file, and it looked like
somebody was going to have to do a bunch of work, to figure out what
could go in and what couldn't.  That's one of the things we were
debating internally about how to make happen, but we didn't tell
anybody that that was going on.

   I never say that the linux-thread.c was portable, and I would have been
   happy to work with Cygnus people on having something reasonnable for
   Linux in 4.18. Unfortunately, the only answer I had after gdb-4.17
   availability was that the Linux support was the lowest priority for
   Cygnus (probably because they don't earn any money for this work,
   which is exactly the same thing for the linux-thread support I did).

It's true that Cygnus has to prioritize its own development work based
on marketplace considerations.  However, Cygnus also pays a number of
its engineers to act as GNU maintainers, which means that we have the
responsibility to work with the net community, to add contributions to
the code base irrespective of its value to Cygnus.  For instance, I
added Robert Hoehne's DJGPP support recently, even though that is of
exactly zero value to Cygnus' business.

   All I can say is that I am very disappointed to see that after 8 months
   of development since gdb-4.17, and the immediate availability of the
   linux-thread debugging after release of 4.17, the gdb-4.18 will be
   delivered without any support for Linux threads. I can only see that
   the effort of integrating the support of HPUX threads has been done,
   and not the support for Linux.

You're quite right to be disappointed here, and I apologize profusely
for the failure.  As the chief maintainer for GDB, it's my fault that
you were not kept informed of what was going on, and that you received
no useful feedback that would have enabled you to revise your code.
This is simply not how we're supposed to do the job!

Going forward, I'm going to be working on improving our responsiveness
and interaction with net contributors.  If you are unsatisfied with
the speed of response, feel free to mail (shebs@cygnus.com) or phone
(+1 408 542 9678) me directly, and I will tell you what is currently
going on with your submittals.

								Stan