Re: Rewriting the type system

[Stan Shebs <shebs at apple dot com>]

Daniel Berlin wrote:
> 
> Jim Blandy <jimb@zwingli.cygnus.com> writes:
> 
> >  By making
> > sure the fundamental design of your change meets their requirements
> > *before* you invest the time to turn your ideas into a patch, you may
> > avoid having to rewrite the change from scratch.
> 
> Not a problem.  By the time the patch gets reviewed, it'll be rewritten anyway.
> Even the very simple patch to add the misc obstack to the objfiles,
> and stop putting things in the psymbol obstack that don't belong, from
> May 29th, hasn't been reviewed yet.

That's two weeks, which is a little long but not unreasonable.

> Hell, the simple bcache change i submitted last year (updating the
> starting constant, fix the indenting) still hasn't
> been reviewed.

That is an unreasonable delay.  As you know from GCC land, the usual
thing there is to post an "Unreviewed patches" messages with xrefs to
the original patch submissions.

> Jim, GDB development is moving a lot slower than it should.  If
> someone told me, after just rewriting the typesystem, that i needed to
> redo it from scratch, i'd probably just start making my own GDB
> releases instead (in effect, forking GDB).  Not out of spite or
> anything, just so i could get stuff done without having to keep track
> of tons of patches that go months without review.

Certainly that is your right according to the GPL, and perhaps even
your duty if GDB maintainers are not doing the job.  However, before
you go that far, I'd at least like to get the official flame that
you have patches X, Y, Z, etc, that have been sitting ignored.
I need the URLs so I can see the followups - perhaps they've been
discussed, but the review proper was poor or incomplete.  Also,
I remember seeing remarks, including some by yourself, to the effect
that some of your patches were incomplete in various ways.  As
someone who's complained about, say, problem code from HP, I'm
sure you'll appreciate the reluctance to take in code which the
author admits has problems.  (I may be mis-remembering - another
reason for pointers to specific messages.)

I admire the energy that you're bringing to GDB development, but
please have some patience.  The review process is our way of keeping
everything working, and because I've been involved with GDB for a
long time and bear a measure of responsibility for its current
state, many times in the past couple of years I've had to watch
somebody struggle with some piece of code, and know that it was
because years earlier it was easy or expedient just to allow it in,
instead of demanding something better.  Not a good feeling,
especially when it's clear that the struggling is consuming time
that could have been used on new development instead.

Stan