Re: Meeting Agenda 2008-08-06

[Tom Tromey <tromey at redhat dot com>]

Some notes from the meeting.

Tom> 1. Welcome back, Eric.

... he isn't back.  We deferred the fireworks to next week.

Tom> 2. Individual status on investigations and learning.
Tom>    Maybe get some rough ETAs?  Anything blocking progress?

We went through the list and everything is going well.  Some issues
mentioned:

* Andrew said that our existing dwarf-reading tools are insufficient.
  Andrew, I forgot to ask at the meeting -- what specifically do you
  need that we can't readily do now?
  Sami mentioned a tool he wrote based on frysk that may help.

* Thiago talked a bit about the syscall tracer's need for debug info.
  This sounds like something needing a kernel hacker's attention; we
  can work with whatever they want to do.

* I'm seeing weird results profiling gdb.  A lot (half) of the
  process' elapsed time is "invisible" -- Roland suggests I/O wait.
  I'll send some more email on the other thread.


Not much information came out about when estimates will be ready, and
I didn't press for this.  Honestly I wonder if this estimation thing
is worth the effort -- comments?  On the one hand I think it is
important to know what we are trying to do, and have at least some
idea for how big these tasks are.  On the other hand, this task seems
vague and I don't want folks to feel bogged down; also I'd rather
avoid people having dead time.  So, what works for you?

Tom> 3. Plan for Fedora-specific patches.
Tom>    I didn't realize there were 125 of them.

First, we're looking for some guidance from Jan.  What can we ignore,
what needs to be done, etc.

There were a couple ways to break down the patches: bug fixes versus
features, commented or not, upstream or not.

Getting these into the archer repository in some form is important.
And, cleaning them up and getting them upstream would also be good.
However, I don't want this to suck up all our time, which it easily
could.

At the very least we can get everything on topic branches.  FWIW
looking at a patch or two might be another good way to gain gdb
knowledge.

Tom> I don't think anybody sent extra agenda items, but we can always add
Tom> more if needed.

We talked about the Python patches.  I think we agreed to move
development to a branch in archer and shut down the gitorious
repository.  Let me know if I'm just projecting my wishes here :)

Tom