Re: kernel summit session on systemtap

[Roland McGrath <roland at redhat dot com>]

You are the only person I've ever heard raise the issue of kernel
compilation time.  At the kernel summit, nobody else mentioned this
concern to me (not that I heard from everyone), and of those I did
talk to, build times were not a concern at all, only the size of the
final debuginfo that has to be installed or distributed somehow.

Before embarking on any plans motivated by a desperate resistance to
-g, I think we should take clearer stock of where this really lies
in the list of priorities.  The plans we already understand and a
have a clear direction to go on about presume -g, and that even a
somewhat slow postprocessing stage is acceptable at least for the
first few cuts.  That approach has manifold benefits, even beyond
just systemtap's concerns, that well motivate putting our limited
hacking resources into it for a variety of long-run payoffs.

Inherently valuable as it is to satisfy Ted's preferences, I fear
descending into a tunnel-vision rat hole of -g avoidance littered
with fresh cans of worms.  If the mythical 80% of real potential
uses by all interested people are well-served by optimizing and
improving the usability of plans we already have, then whole new
swaths of effort guided solely by -g avoidance seem likely to be poor
allocations of our resources, even at the risk of Ted's disenchantment.


Thanks,
Roland