Re: x86 fpu

[Stan Shebs <shebs at cygnus dot com>]

   Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1999 23:06:00 -0700 (PDT)
   From: hjl@lucon.org (H.J. Lu)

   [...] It is a pain for me to maintain my
   private versions. But I hate to see the Linux people nowhere to
   go for help. Do you really honestly believe that a new official
   version should be made whenever a serious Linux related bug is
   fixed or we have to live with the bug which mainly affects Linux?

That's not necessarily a bad idea... If one were to look at which
platform has the largest number of GDB-using programmers these days,
it would most likely be GNU/Linux by far.  Why can't the GDB release
schedule be adjusted to accommodate the majority of users?

   I have been sending my patches to the appropriate people. But they
   don't work only for Linux. My patches have to wait, but Linux cann't.
   It is not that unusual to take a few months or more for my patches
   to be installed.  What do we do?

This is the genesis of the situation.  Patch submissions should be
acted upon promptly, whether to accept or reject.  It's my
responsibility to see that this happens, and if I fail at that,
I'm not going to fault anyone for coming up with workarounds like
splinter versions.

I hope everybody agrees that patch turnaround has improved over the
past several months.  It's still not where it should be; if you feel a
worthy patch is being ignored, please send me mail with lots of
capital letters and exclamation points, or call me on the phone at
+1 408 542 9678.

   I will work with everyone to merge my changes. But it doesn't mean
   I will stop working for the Linux community. We have different
   priorities. That is life.

This should not be true however.  I used to think this myself, until
RMS pointed out that since Linux is one of the official kernels for
the GNU system, GDB support for it ought to be a higher priority than
support for non-GNU systems.  Of course, GDB is still free software
like always, and I still want to encourage people to contribute
improvements for non-GNU systems as well.

Lately, Jim Blandy and Jim Kingdon have stepped up to the task of
making sure the FSF version of GDB is fully functional for GNU/Linux,
and there has been considerable progress, as witness the discussion of
x86 float support.  Also, Scott Bambrough has been hard at work on
Netwinder (ARM) support, and Kevin Buettner is on PowerPC.  At this
rate, I expect that the upcoming 5.0 release will be the version of
choice for GNU/Linux.

								Stan