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 be
10 able to maintain a local copy of GDB that is no more than one day older than
11 the official source tree used by the GDB maintainers.
13 The primary purpose of providing snapshots is to widen the group of motivated
14 developers that would like to help test, debug, and enhance GDB, by providing
15 you with access to the "latest and greatest" source. This has several
16 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 daily, so that users getting a
72 snapshot for the first time, or updating after a long period of not updating,
73 can get the latest version in a single operation. Along with the full
74 snapshot, we will provide incremental diffs on a daily basis. Each daily diff
75 will be relative to the source tree after applying all previous daily diffs.
76 The daily diffs are for people who have relatively low bandwidth ftp or uucp
79 The files will be available via anonymous ftp from ftp.cygnus.com, in
80 directory pub/gdb, and should look something like:
83 gdb-930401-930402.diff.z
84 gdb-930402-930403.diff.z
85 gdb-930403-930404.diff.z
90 At some point, the files should automatically appear during the evening as a
91 result of an automatically run process each evening. For the moment however,
92 the process will be manually run by one of the gdb maintainers and the
93 appropriate files moved to the ftp area at some convenient point during the
96 Note that the current plan is to provide GNU gzip compressed files only. You
97 can ftp gzip from prep.ai.mit.edu in directory pub/gnu.
99 Also, even though we will make the snapshots available on a publically
100 accessible ftp area, we ask that recipients not widely publicise their
101 availability. The motivation for this request is not to hoard them, but to
102 avoid the situation where the general GDB user base naively attempts to use
103 the snapshots, has trouble with them, complains publically, and the reputation
104 of GDB suffers because of a perception of instability or lack of quality
111 A test suite is distributed as an integral part of the snapshots. However, to
112 use it you will need to get a copy of the dejagnu testing framework.
113 Snapshots of dejagnu are available alongside the GDB snapshots, using the same
114 naming conventions as the GDB snapshots. Once you have installed the dejagnu
115 framework, a simple "make check" in the GDB directory should be sufficient to
118 Note that the test suite is still in its infancy. The test framework itself
119 might not install on your system if you have an environment that is not
120 similar to one that the GDB developers already use. The tests themselves only
121 cover a small portion of GDB features, and what tests do exist for a feature
122 are not exhaustive. New tests are welcomed.
125 GETTING HELP, GDB DISCUSSIONS, etc
126 ----------------------------------
128 Mail sent to gdb-testers@cygnus.com goes to everyone on the list of gdb
129 testers, which should include everyone getting the gdb snapshots. It is
130 appropriate whenever you wish your mail to be seen by all the testers. This
131 would include announcements of any kind, notices of intent to implement a
132 specific enhancement (to coordinate with other people on the list), etc.
133 Before sending something to gdb-testers, ask yourself if what you are about to
134 send would be something you would care to see show up in your mailbox if it
135 was sent by someone else.
137 Mail sent to gdb-patches@cygnus.com goes to gdb support people internal to
138 Cygnus. Despite the name, it is appropriate for more than just patches.
139 Questions about the snapshots, problems accessing the snapshots, bug reports
140 without patches, requests for advice on how to track down a bug you have
141 encountered, discussion about bug fixes or enhancements in progress, etc are
142 all welcome in gdb-patches. Usually mail sent to gdb-patches will result in a
143 short private email discussion between you and one or more of the gdb
144 developers who can assist you with simple questions or handle your patches.
145 Note that gdb-patches is *not* a general gdb electronic support line. If you
146 are in need of such support, you probably should not be using the snapshots
147 and should seek out one of the commercial suppliers of support for free
150 Do *not* send any questions about the snapshots or patches specific to the
151 snapshots to bug-gdb@prep.ai.mit.edu (gateway'd to the usenet group
152 gnu.gdb.bug). Nobody there will have any idea what you are talking about and
153 it will just cause confusion.
159 Send bug reports to gdb-patches@cygnus.com.
161 Note that since no testing is done on the snapshots, and snapshots may even be
162 made when gdb is in an inconsistent state, it may not be unusual for an
163 occasional snapshot to have a very obvious bug, such as failure to compile on
164 *any* machine. It is likely that such bugs will be fixed by the next
165 snapshot, so it really isn't necessary to report them unless they persist for
168 Missing files should always be reported, since they usually mean there is a
169 problem with the snapshot-generating process and we won't know about them
170 unless someone tells us.
172 Bugs which are non-obvious, such as failure to compile on only a specific
173 machine, a new machine dependent or obscure bug (particularly one not detected
174 by the testsuite), etc should be reported when you discover them, or have a
175 suggested patch to fix them.
181 If you have a fix for a bug, or an enhancement to submit, send your patch to
182 gdb-patches@cygnus.com. Here are some simple guidelines for submitting
185 o Use "context diffs" for patches. A typical command for generating
186 context diffs is "diff -rc gdb-old gdb-new".
188 o Use the "minimalist approach" for patches. That is, each patch
189 should address only one particular bug, new feature, etc. Do not
190 save up many unrelated changes and submit them all in one big
191 patch, since in general, the larger the patch the more difficult
192 it is for us to decide if the patch is either correct or
193 desirable. And if we find something about the patch that needs
194 to be corrected before it can be installed, we would have to reject
195 the entire patch, which might contain changes which otherwise would
196 be accepted if submitted separately.
198 o Submit a sample ChangeLog entry with your patch. See the existing
199 GDB ChangeLog for examples of what a ChangeLog entry should look
200 like. The emacs command ^X4A will create a ChangeLog entry header
207 GDB's language parsers are all portable, and can be compiled with bison,
208 byacc, traditional Unix yacc, or other compatible parser generators. For
209 various reasons, Cygnus uses byacc rather than bison by default. When a
210 general gdb distribution is made, this default is switched back to bison. The
211 snapshots follow the Cygnus default. Your options, if you do not already have
212 byacc installed, include:
214 o Hack the upper level Makefile.in lines that look like:
216 BISON = `if [ -f $${rootme}/byacc/byacc ] ; \
217 then echo $${rootme}/byacc/byacc ; \
218 else echo byacc ; \ <== change
221 to replace "byacc" with either "yacc" or "bison -y".
223 o Fetch the byacc snapshot from the same location as the gdb snapshots
226 o Specify BISON=yacc on the make command line to override the default.
229 UNIX MAKE and GNU MAKE
230 ----------------------
232 When you build gdb in the same directory as the source, you should be able to
233 use any available "make" that has traditional UNIX make functionality. If you
234 build gdb in a separate directory tree from the source, using the configure
235 "--srcdir" option, then only GNU make is fully supported, although other makes
236 with complete VPATH support should work (SunOS make for example).
240 Thanks for your help and support.