Re: which patches to review

[Andrew Cagney <ac131313 at cygnus dot com>]

Please remember, GDB isn't GCC, is it Linux Kernel list.

> One of the differences I notice with GCC is that there is less
> agonizing over every detail of every patch.  When I put the basic
> Darwin support into GCC, the files actually carried along some
> crufty dead code inherited from old NeXT stuff, but since it only
> affected Darwin, nobody worried about it (since then most of it
> has been whacked).  There have been other patches that were brave
> attempts, and looked good at first sight, but that didn't last a
> week and had to be reverted.  No biggie, that's just a normal
> part of the development process.

Here, you're mistaken.

GDB has (fairly clearly) communicated standards and provided they are 
met, the new port just drops in.  They don't get thrown into limbo 
because a two month feature freeze.  They don't get wedged because the 
toolchain won't build for three weeks. They are even, typically, get 
pulled into release branches.

Its kind of ironic that while all this flaming has been going on, a 
brand new port of gdb (ALPHA/NetBSD) has just been dropped into place. 
A second target port, AVR is about ready to go (I got a panic attack and 
need to go back the assignments clerk.)  otherwize it, again, will drop 
into place.  The AVR port will likely even be pulled into the 5.2 branch 
as soon as 5.2 is released.

> Another thing I notice with GCC is that while there is a wish
> list for future development directions, patches are usually not
> held hostage to that list.  It's OK for instance to wish that a
> contributor would multi-arch an old macro instead of submitting
> yet another use of it, but if the contributor doesn't want to do
> that, take the patch anyway and worry about multi-arching later.

Again, you are mistaken.

GDB developers approve patches with ``please create a bug report'' and 
please include a FIXME...  However, they do also ensure that, to best 
code (in a pragmatic sense) goes in.  Have you recently looked in the 
bug database?

Or to look at it another way, we no longer screw up with things like the 
HP Merge.

enjoy,
Andrew