Re: RFA: [infrun.c] Fix to "nexti".

[Kevin Buettner <kevinb at cygnus dot com>]

On Jan 15,  1:29pm, Fernando Nasser wrote:

> Kevin Buettner wrote:
> > 
> > On Jan 15, 11:36am, Christopher Faylor wrote:
> > 
> > > On Mon, Jan 15, 2001 at 10:35:27AM -0500, Fernando Nasser wrote:
> > > >If there is a maintainer for this code please speak up.
> > > >
> > > >Otherwise I will check this in under the "obvious fix" rule.
> > >
> > > Do we really have an "obvious fix" rule?  It seems that there is
> > > some confusion on this issue.
> > 
> > We do not have an "obvious fix" rule.  See
> > 
> >     http://sources.redhat.com/ml/gdb-patches/2000-04/msg00468.html
> > 
> 
> If you go throughout the list you'll find that it has been mentioned and 
> invoked several times in other messages.  It is not well defined though,
> and it does not seem to be written anywhere either.

Would you mind pointing a few of these out?  I've searched for
"obvious" in the gdb-patches archive, but it generates a lot of hits. 

(I'm curious about whether it's "blanket write privs" maintainers
who are invoking this rule.)

> As it is not written what to do when the maintainers do not respond and 
> something is broken.  Do we keep downloading rotten code?  These bugs
> are very costly in that people waste hours of work because of them.

I don't know what the right answer is.

With regard to the infrun.c patch, however, I did take a look at it
and it wasn't clear to me that it was "obviously" right.  I'm not
saying it's wrong either, but that code is complicated and requires
some study.

> The message above mentions a problem with regards to small fixes in
> codes outside one's maintainership that go wrong.  Sometimes
> the original problem is fixed but some other is created.
> That is why we use CVS.  The change can be reversed and the maintainer
> (when he/she shows up) has a complete record of what has been changed
> and
> why (in addition to the list archives).
> 
> I don't know what is the better/right solution to the problem, but we do
> have a problem now with regarding to bug fixes, specially small fix to 
> harmful ones.  We do need a fast track to them and even consider
> temporary
> fixes (properly marked with FIXME and entries in the TODO file).

If those of us working on gdb could have some of their time freed up
to spend on our maintainership duties, that will clearly be a step in
the right direction.  But I agree that we ought to have a process in
place to deal with the situations you describe.