Re: New GDB snapshot available

[Eric Paire <e.paire@opengroup.org>]

> 
>    From: hjl@lucon.org (H.J. Lu)
>    Date: Fri, 5 Mar 1999 15:05:58 -0800 (PST)
> 
>    >    From: hjl@lucon.org (H.J. Lu)
>    >    Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 16:54:20 -0800 (PST)
>    > 
>    >    > as for threads, the code I've seen so far seems to have reliability
>    >    > and portability problems, so that's going to need some more work I
>    >    > think.
>    > 
>    >    The one in gdb 4.17.0.11 is very reliability. As for portability,
>    >    it is totally a different issue. I don't see it as a problem.
>    > 
>    > Ah, what luxury. :-) I find that if I do something nonportable for
>    > the HPers, the Linuxers hate me, and vice versa.  Then there's the
>    > embedded folks...
>    > 
> 
>    The glibc thread debug portability I was referring to is for the
>    future glibc thread. The glibc thread debug won't work on Solaris.
>    I don't know why you want to.
> 
> Of course the glibc approach to thread debugging won't work with
> Solaris.  Since the thread debug lib doesn't exist yet, I was
> assuming that when you were referring to 4.17.0.11, you meant the
> OSF version of thread debugging, which is not portable and makes
> many changes to code shared by all platforms.  What thread debugging
> code is in 4.17.0.11?
> 
Do you really mean that there is a portable way of debugging user-level
implementation of thread package ? If it is the case, then I don't
understand why you accept a hpux-thread.c file in the gdb sources and
not a linux-thread.c one (which I tried to develop without any processor
dependencies, so that it should work with any Linux, but of course not
with Solaris ;-).

I never say that the linux-thread.c was portable, and I would have been
happy to work with Cygnus people on having something reasonnable for
Linux in 4.18. Unfortunately, the only answer I had after gdb-4.17
availability was that the Linux support was the lowest priority for
Cygnus (probably because they don't earn any money for this work,
which is exactly the same thing for the linux-thread support I did).

I had more luck with glibc support (many thanks to Ulrich Drepper),
which user-level modifications have been accepted quickly and inserted
in the linuxthreads reference tree quickly. I am also almost sure that
the thread-level debugging support in Linux has been largely used by
all people working on Linux (I can think of multithreaded glibc, Java,
apache, ...).

All I can say is that I am very disappointed to see that after 8 months
of development since gdb-4.17, and the immediate availability of the
linux-thread debugging after release of 4.17, the gdb-4.18 will be
delivered without any support for Linux threads. I can only see that
the effort of integrating the support of HPUX threads has been done,
and not the support for Linux.

I am not particularly angry against anybody (no flame at all), and I
hope that people will not feel personnaly attacked by this mail, and
in particular Cygnus people which I respect for the very good job they
do for the community. All I want to show here is that it is very difficult
to support free software when you work for a company, because you have
to be paid with what your company sells. It is probably what happened
to Cygnus gdb team with Linux thread support, and which does not seem
to be the case for egcs.

Finally, what I deeply deplore is that it is not fair to give technical
reasons of not inserting linux-threads support in the upcoming gdb-4.18,
because I offered my time to the gdb team last summer to help them
introducing linux-threads in the reference tree, but never received any
answer except that inserting support for hpux-threads was the main
priority. Now, it is too late since I am very busy on other projects.
The only thing that I will do in the near future is to provide Linus
Torvalds with kernel patches of the small bugs I have discovered with
this development.

Best regards,
-Eric (original developer of the linux-thread support in gdb-4.17)
P.S. Sorry for my bad English ...
+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+ Eric PAIRE
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