Re: [commit] Deprecate remaining STREQ uses

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz at elta dot co dot il>]

> Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2003 01:22:30 -0500 (EST)
> From: mec.gnu@mindspring.com (Michael Elizabeth Chastain)
> 
> eli> Since your proposal for deprecating counts minor releases, would it
> eli> be enough to request a run for every such release?
> mec> In my opinion, no.
> eli> Why not?
> 
> Known regressions still go months before fixing.  And I don't mean
> "months until the elusive bug can be duplicate"; I mean "months after I
> file a PR with a simple test case and a pointer to the exact patch where
> gdb broke".
> 
> Then consider how much worse this would be if I did one run per release
> instead of several runs per week.

I agree that your suggestion will probably leave us with less bugs.
But I'm concerned that we could inadvertently spill the baby, if we
assume that any port that hasn't seen official testing does not work
and should be obsoleted.

> eli> Isn't it better to start deprecating only if we know that some code
> eli> specific to a platform is broken by a certain change to GDB?
> mec> Again, in my opinion, no.
> eli> Again, why not?
> 
> Because nobody knows what change is going to break what platform.

I think quite a few changes are known to break platforms for which a
replacement for a deprecated interface was not submitted.

> And I'm getting tired of this conversation because I don't see any
> constructive action coming out of it.

I'm sorry I took your time; I thought this issue was important enough
to be discussed at some length.

The constructive action that could come out of this, in my view, is if
we agree that hasty removal of support for platforms is potentially
destructive and should be used with great caution.

What about others: am I the only one who thinks we shouldn't be
obsoleting platforms hastily for lack of officially-certified testing?

> I'm going to continue my
> aggressive QA campaign.  When I bump into someone, such as I've bumped
> into David Anglin or you, my attitude is going to be "well, what can you
> contribute to support the platform?"

My comment to this is that we should sometimes think about users, not
only developers.  Being overly harsh to the users by removing support
for their platforms too quickly is something I think we should avoid.