Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2000 17:55:54 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: eivind@FreeBSD.ORG (Eivind Eklund) Cc: jhb@FreeBSD.ORG (John Baldwin), arch@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Turning on debugging in GENERIC Message-ID: <200011151755.KAA13742@usr01.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <20001115134312.C7752@warning.follo.net> from "Eivind Eklund" at Nov 15, 2000 01:43:12 PM
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> 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. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200011151755.KAA13742>