From owner-freebsd-arch  Wed Nov 15  9:56: 8 2000
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From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com>
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Subject: Re: Turning on debugging in GENERIC
To: eivind@FreeBSD.ORG (Eivind Eklund)
Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2000 17:55:54 +0000 (GMT)
Cc: jhb@FreeBSD.ORG (John Baldwin), arch@FreeBSD.ORG
In-Reply-To: <20001115134312.C7752@warning.follo.net> from "Eivind Eklund" at Nov 15, 2000 01:43:12 PM
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> I'm not sure I'm happy about DIAGNOSTIC; unless changed, it
> significantly change some codepaths, and it produce output about system
> state, not just extra checks.  Any plain checks that are under DIAGNOSTIC is
> there through a miscommunication or not finished conversion, anyway; it
> should only be causing extra debug output.

I am not happy about the code path changes it engenders.

However, I see the need for turning it on, during a period
where extreme instability of snapshots is anticipated/likely,
and I think that's the reason it is being proposed.

Many people "try" -current on small scratch disks that they
install from snapshots, rather than polluting their local
trees with -current bits, particularly since the answer to
their bug reports is pretty much to ignore them and tell the
reporter to "resup" or ask "have you tried the snapshot?".

I think that having the DIAGNOSTIC option is OK; on the other
hand, I somewhat wish that this would move from a GENERIC
file into a SNAPSHOT file, and that snapshots be configured
from there instead of GENERIC, since reverting this back and
forth every six months, instead of changing a cron script,
seems like a real waste of repository commits.


All that said, let's not downplay the code path changes: I
have worked in places where I had to be "the grumpy old man
of the source tree", when the code would not build due to
"DEBUG" _not_ being asserted during the build, or other such
diagnostic manifest constants.  I really dislike manifest
constants in all forms, because of this, and prefer link or
run time tuning.

I really see no _good_ reason a source repository should not
be at least buildable at all times, other than laziness, but
that's an argument for another day.


					Terry Lambert
					terry@lambert.org
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.


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