Re: Preview: portable dumper

[John Wiegley]

>>>>> Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

> Accepting this patch means we believe in this direction, consider it a
> perspective one, enough so that we are willing to invest a non-trivial
> amount of energy into making it happen, fix the fallout, debug the results,
> etc. We are talking about at least one major release, maybe more, and
> definitely several minor releases. IOW, we are talking several years. I
> don't think we should gamble with such high stakes, not unless we sure we
> want to go there, because this is the best alternative of [...]

If I didn't know you were talking about pdumper vs. unexec here, I'd swear
this above paragraph was expressing my own concerns about merging Tromey's
concurrency branch. My issues then were exactly the same: very few people who
understand the C implementation, and a multi-year commitment down a road that
may not be the right solution. Yet you agreed that merging it in was fine,
since we could gain experience and at least there's someone who actually did
the work.

Why is pdumper not the same scenario? We have commitment from someone willing
to work on it, he's even willing to write documentation, and it will give us
experience in an area we're free to change at any time, because it doesn't
expose APIs to the end user.

I say we try it, while keeping unexec in place, until it becomes more obvious
that we shouldn't. If we wait too long for the "best alternative", it might
the same as what happened to concurrency: it never happens, because there's
always a concern about the unexpected-down-the-road.

-- 
John Wiegley                  GPG fingerprint = 4710 CF98 AF9B 327B B80F
http://newartisans.com                          60E1 46C4 BD1A 7AC1 4BA2