Re: Proposal: obsolete target hppa*-hp-hpux10.*

[mec dot gnu at mindspring dot com (Michael Elizabeth Chastain)]

ac> Can I guess that you're, at least in part, working on 11.11 because it 
ac> is a stable PA RISC based platform and offers a path for getting 
ac> GNU/Linux PA out of limbo?

Stand back, I'm gonna vent ...

Well, no.

My original motivation was that there's a lot of code in the test suite
which is HP-specific.  gdb.cp/local.exp has all these cases for HP
compilers and I can't touch them.  Now I can touch them.  funcargs.exp
had twenty-three instances of "if { $hp_cc_compiler } { setup_xfail
hppa*-hp-hpux* }".  funcargs.exp now has zero instances of
"$hp_cc_compiler".

Same for gdb itself.  You ran gcov and there were a lot of files not
covered.  The problem is particularly acute for the symtab readers.  As
I write this, I'm working on a gcov version (thanks Elena Z for her
message of 2003-01-06, which makes it really easy) so I can take care of
deprecation in hpread.c and somread.c.

I'd like to get on alphaev*-*-osf5.1 as well.  Anything with a vendor
compiler.  It's all about code coverage.

My long term plan is:

  . gdb includes a list of supported configurations
  . each supported configuration gets regression tested regularly
  . the test results get posted to gdb-testers@
  . somebody reviews the results before each release

(Also, after I started this work, I realized that it fits another,
more personal goal).

I don't care about hppa*-*-linux.  It's low priority for the future,
too.  As I understand it, HP is phasing out hppa architecture in favor
of ia64.  Their transition will take several more years and I do want to
support hppa*-hp-hpux* for several more years.  But hppa boxes are going
away.

Back in the early days of GNU software, there was a hand-me-down
mentality, or a bootstrap mentality if you prefer.  We took whatever
machines we could get, suffered with the vendor OS and the vendor shell,
and bootstrapped a partial GNU system on them.  Even our release process
still has a "sun4" buried in it.  (I thought that was funny a year ago
when I noticed it.  Now it's a release show-stopper).

But the Penguin is here.  My system is open source starting from the
first block that the BIOS reads from the hard disk.  So is yours,
probably.  And it's cheap.  And it's high quality.  If I want another
GNU system, it takes me 1-3 days to work and earn money and buy another
i686-pc-linux-gnu system.  It would take me much longer to configure a
working hppa*-*-linux system even if the hardware was *free*, because I
hear that there are bugs in hppa*-*-linux where gdb crashes the kernel,
and someone has to fix those bugs.

We are no longer in the days when machines cost two months of an
engineer's salary and the way to get a GNU system was to scrounge a
hand-me-down machine and port GNU to it.  Now the way to get a GNU
system is to spend a few day's salary and stick in a CD.

I can't choose other people's goals and priorities, but I think that
hppa*-*-linux is a hobby and will not help with world domination, and
the Debian hppa/linux distro is a waste of time.  It's many engineer
months for a system that O(10) or O(100) people will run and they are
short of engineer months for their other goals with Sarge.  But it's
their goals, their choice.  Just my opinion.

Contrast with C++.  Look what's written in C++: Mozilla, Open Office,
KDE, Cygwin.  Our prospects in the desktop war depend on C++ apps, and
gdb support for C++ is a weak link in the development chain.

And yes, I know that I'm personal-computer-centric.  That's my bias.
But even after that bias, I think that Linux in the workstation and
server market is a lot more interesting when the vendor actively sells
and supports it.

And maybe I'm completely wrong about this and HP actively supports
hppa*-*-linux, they give the developers all the internal docs that they
need, and sell a lot of hppa*-*-linux, the way IBM sells linux.

Michael C