Re: gdb 5.2 removes the conditional breakpoints

["Michael Veksler" <VEKSLER at il dot ibm dot com>]

This is a real problem. Your argument that "5,2 has been around for ~4
years" does not hold water, how many people have been using 5.2 ? The "many
eyeballs" effect takes place only when you "release early, release often"
and 4 years cycle is anything but "often".

<rant>
Now that you have a branch, people will start using it. Bugs will be
spotted, some of them will be critical (SEGV), some will be very bad (an
important gdb state gets reset upon restart) and others will be simply
annoying (print syntax will not work the way it is supposed to). That's
life. If you want to make gdb better, you'd have to do things that the gcc
team does now:
1. Shorten development cycle (gcc's goal is 6 months, but ,
    they'll probably need 8)/
2. Fix regressions of a branch even if they have "been around for 4 years".
3. Fix bugs even if they are not yours (gcc-2.95.4 had a work-around for
    a glibc bug).

I started 5.2 evaluation only a month ago. The first bug I noticed was that
it crashed with SEGV every time (which I reported, and it got fixed). The
second bug (few hours later), was this conditional breakpoint problem. This
problem is very annoying in C++. Every condition with virtual functions
gets removed (at least those that I tried).

I did not report it, because I am only toying with migrating my code to
Linux and doing it in my spare time. My product is libraries, so it is my
responsibility to make sure my users/customers can debug the code. So if
they are about to run it on Linux, I have to make sure they can use gdb
comfortably. If important fixes (like this one) do not get applied, I'll
have to maintain a fork of gdb. I do not get paid to maintain Free SW (or
OSS), so I hate this option (my manager will probably hate this even more).
My users will hate this also (who wants to use forked code?)
</rant>

Please apply this patch to 5.2 branch (or at least say what's wrong with
the patch, so that it can be perfected, and applied).


   Michael


Andrew Cagney <ac131313@cygnus.com> on 18-04-2002 06:21:02

Please respond to Andrew Cagney <ac131313@cygnus.com>

To:    "H . J . Lu" <hjl@lucon.org>
cc:    Michael Veksler/Haifa/IBM@IBMIL, gdb@sources.redhat.com
Subject:    Re: gdb 5.2 removes the conditional breakpoints



> On Wed, Apr 17, 2002 at 08:34:54PM -0400, Andrew Cagney wrote:
>
>> >
>> > May I check it into gdb 5.2?
>
>>
>> No.  5,2 is effectivly frozen.  I've the README file to fix, that is it.
>>
>
>
> It works with gdb 4.17 and someone broke it in 5.x. How long does it
> take to fix it?

(looks under table, nope, no fire ...)

H.J. This ``very bad regression from gdb 4,17'' that must be in 5,2 has
been around for ~4 years now without anyone even thinking to report it!
Perhaphs it isn't so bad after all :-)

BTW, a real .exp testcase?

Andrew