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From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)
Subject: Re: GDB Woes Continued...
Date: 1998/02/02
Message-ID: <dewar.886438129@merv>#1/1
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Date: 1998-02-02T00:00:00+00:00
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<<Definitely.  What really irks me is the fact that the bugs
and flakiness would NEVER have made it through if someone had
bothered to test the thing.  There is no way that you get
a completely, 100% broken help system and 50% (or higher)
crash rate coming through the test.

The way I see it, somebody pulled out the Unix source,
threw it at some automatic conversion protocols and
figured "that's good enough for those windows bastards, if
they don't like it, let them get Linux!".
>>

Actually, as many of you know, we delayed the release of the NT debugger
publicly even though it seemed to work fairly well on NT until we got a
version that would work reasonably well on Win95. It works well on at
least some Win95 systems, all except for the restart capability, which
is documented to be broken (and is not easy to fix). We also heard
from our beta testers that it was working.

It sure is odd to hear of reports of it being totally broken on Win95.
We have a couple of customers on Win95 who are using it without anything
like these troubles. 

We are certainly finding that Win95 is not as compatible with NT as
certain folks would like us to think :-)

Contrary to the scenario above, a LOT of work has gone into the NT
version of the debugger to get around the Win95 problems. 

One thing this confirms incidentally is that the general ACT strategy of
not releasing things publicly until they have been really well shaken
down is a good one. In the case of the Win95 debugger, people were
screaming at us for a long time for not releasing a public version,
and we very conciously decided to release this as soon as we had at
least some reports of it working fine under Win95, and (for example)
it certainly works OK on my Win95 setup. It certainly seems like
milage varies on different versions of Win95, and it is hard to know
exactly what the sources of the variation might be.

As always, if you have very specific examples of failures, send the
reports along to report@gnat.com.

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies