8 Snapshots are an "image" of the main GDB development tree, captured at a
9 particular random instant in time. When you use the snapshots, you should
10 be able to maintain a local copy of GDB that is no more than one day older
11 than the official source tree used by the GDB maintainers.
13 The primary purpose of providing snapshots is to widen the group of
14 motivated developers that would like to help test, debug, and enhance GDB,
15 by providing you with access to the "latest and greatest" source.
16 This has several advantages, and several disadvantages.
20 o Once we have a large base of motivated testers using the snapshots,
21 this should provide good coverage across all currently supported
22 GDB hosts and targets. If a new bug is introduced in GDB due to
23 fixing another bug or ongoing development, it should become
24 obvious much more quickly and get fixed before the next general
25 net release. This should help to reduce the chances of GDB being
26 released to the general public with a major bug that went unnoticed
27 during the release cycle testing because they are machine dependent.
28 We hope to greatly improve GDB's stability and reliability by
29 involving more people and more execution environments in the
32 o With access to the latest source, any diffs that you send to fix
33 bugs or add new features should be much easier for the GDB team
34 to merge into the official source base (after suitable review
35 of course). This encourages us to merge your changes quicker,
36 while they are still "fresh".
38 o Once your diffs are merged, you can obtain a new copy of GDB
39 containing your changes almost immediately. Thus you do not
40 have to maintain local copies of your changes for any longer
41 than it takes to get them merged into the official source base.
42 This encourages you to send in changes quicker.
44 And the disadvantages:
46 o The snapshot you get will be largely untested and of unknown quality.
47 It may fail to configure or compile. It may have serious bugs.
48 You should always keep a copy of the last known working version
49 before updating to the current snapshot, or at least be able to
50 regenerate a working version if the latest snapshot is unusable
51 in your environment for some reason.
53 If a production version of GDB has a bug and a snapshot has the fix,
54 and you care about stability, you should put only the fix for that
55 particular problem into your production version. Of course, if you
56 are eager to test GDB, you can use the snapshot versions in your
57 daily work, but users who have not been consulted about whether they
58 feel like testing GDB should generally have something which is at
59 least as bug free as the last released version.
61 o Providing timely response to your questions, bug reports, and
62 submitted patches will require the GDB development team to allocate
63 time from an already thin time budget. Please try to help us make
64 this time as productive as possible. See the section below about
65 how to submit changes.
68 HOW TO GET THE SNAPSHOTS
69 ------------------------
71 The current plan is to provide a full snapshot once weekly, and incremental
72 diffs on a daily basis. Each daily diff will be relative to the source
73 tree for the previous day after applying all incremental diffs to date.
75 The files will be available via anonymous ftp from ftp.cygnus.com, in
76 directory pub/gdb, and should look something like:
79 gdb-930401-930402.diff.z
80 gdb-930402-930403.diff.z
81 gdb-930403-930404.diff.z
86 At some point, the files should automatically appear during the evening
87 as a result of an automatically run process each evening. For the moment
88 however, the process will be manually run by one of the gdb maintainers
89 and the appropriate files moved to the ftp area at some convenient point
92 Note that the current plan is to provide GNU gzip compressed files only.
93 You can ftp gzip from prep.ai.mit.edu in directory pub/gnu.
95 Also, as the gcc developers did with their gcc snapshot system, even though
96 we will make the snapshots available on a publically accessible ftp area,
97 we ask that recipients not widely publicise their availability. The motivation
98 for this request is not to hoard them, but to avoid the situation where
99 the general GDB user base naively attempts to use the snapshots, has trouble
100 with them, complains publically, and the reputation of GDB declines because
101 of a perception of instability or lack of quality control.
107 A test suite is distributed as an integral part of the snapshots. However,
108 to use it you will need to get a copy of the dejagnu testing framework.
109 Snapshots of dejagnu are available alongside the GDB snapshots, using
110 the same naming conventions as the GDB snapshots. Once you have installed
111 the dejagnu framework, a simple "make check" in the GDB directory should
112 be sufficient to run the tests.
114 Note that the test suite is still in its infancy. The test framework
115 itself might not install on your system if you have an environment that
116 is not similar to one that the GDB developers already use. The tests
117 themselves only cover a small portion of GDB features, and what tests
118 do exist for a feature are not exhaustive. New tests are welcomed.
121 GETTING HELP, GDB DISCUSSIONS, etc
122 ----------------------------------
124 Mail sent to gdb-testers@cygnus.com goes to everyone on the list of gdb
125 testers, which should include everyone getting the gdb snapshots. It is
126 appropriate whenever you wish your mail to be seen by all the testers.
127 This would include announcements of any kind, notices of intent to implement
128 a specific enhancement (to coordinate with other people on the list), etc.
129 Before sending something to gdb-testers, ask yourself if what you are about
130 to send would be something you would care to see show up in your mailbox if
131 it was sent by someone else.
133 Mail sent to gdb-patches@cygnus.com goes to gdb support people internal to
134 Cygnus. Despite the name, it is appropriate for more than just patches.
135 Questions about the snapshots, problems accessing the snapshots, bug reports
136 without patches, requests for advice on how to track down a bug you have
137 encountered, discussion about bug fixes or enhancements in progress, etc are
138 all welcome in gdb-patches. Usually mail sent to gdb-patches will result in
139 a short private email discussion between you and one or more of the gdb
140 developers who can assist you with simple questions or handle your patches.
141 Note that gdb-patches is *not* a general gdb electronic support line.
142 If you are in need of such support, you probably should not be using the
143 snapshots and should seek out one of the commercial suppliers of support
146 Do *not* send any questions about the snapshots or patches specific to
147 the snapshots to bug-gdb@prep.ai.mit.edu (gateway'd to the usenet group
148 gnu.gdb.bug). Nobody there will have any idea what you are talking about
149 and it will just cause confusion.
155 Send bug reports to gdb-patches@cygnus.com.
157 Note that since no testing is done on the snapshots, and snapshots may even
158 be made when gdb is in an inconsistent state, it may not be unusual for an
159 occasional snapshot to have a very obvious bug, such as failure to compile
160 on *any* machine. It is likely that such bugs will be fixed by the next
161 snapshot, so it really isn't necessary to report them unless they persist
164 Bugs which are non-obvious, such as failure to compile on only a specific
165 machine, a new machine dependent bug (particularly one not detected by the
166 testsuite), missing machine dependent files, etc should be reported when
167 you discover them, or have a suggested patch to fix them.
173 If you have a fix for a bug, or an enhancement to submit, send your
174 patch to gdb-patches@cygnus.com. Here are some simple guidelines for
177 o Use "context diffs" for patches. A typical command for generating
178 context diffs is "diff -rc gdb-old gdb-new".
180 o Use the "minimalist approach" for patches. That is, each patch
181 should address only one particular bug, new feature, etc. Do not
182 save up many unrelated changes and submit them all in one big
183 patch, since in general, the larger the patch the more difficult
184 it is for us to decide if the patch is either correct or
185 desirable. And if we find something about the patch that needs
186 to be corrected before it can be installed, we would have to reject
187 the entire patch, which might contain changes which otherwise would
188 be accepted if submitted separately.
190 o Submit a sample ChangeLog entry with your patch. See the existing
191 GDB ChangeLog for examples of what a ChangeLog entry should look
192 like. The emacs command ^X4A will create a ChangeLog entry header
199 GDB's language parsers are all portable, and can be compiled with bison,
200 byacc, traditional Unix yacc, or other compatible parser generators.
201 For various reasons, Cygnus uses byacc rather than bison by default. When
202 a general gdb distribution is made, this default is switched back to bison.
203 The snapshots follow the Cygnus default. Your options, if you do not already
204 have byacc installed, include:
206 o Hack the upper level Makefile.in lines that look like:
208 BISON = `if [ -f $${rootme}/byacc/byacc ] ; \
209 then echo $${rootme}/byacc/byacc ; \
210 else echo byacc ; \ <== change
213 to replace "byacc" with either "yacc" or "bison -y".
215 o Fetch the byacc snapshot from the same location as the gdb snapshots
218 o Specify BISON=yacc on the make command line to override the default.
221 UNIX MAKE and GNU MAKE
222 ----------------------
224 When you build gdb in the same directory as the source, you should be able
225 to use any available "make" that has traditional UNIX make functionality.
226 If you build gdb in a separate directory tree from the source, using the
227 configure "--srcdir" option, then only GNU make is fully supported, although
228 other makes with complete VPATH support should work (SunOS make for example).
232 Thanks for your help and support.