The "iGoogle bug"

[Jordan Crouse]

On 18/09/07 20:09 -0400, Bernardo Innocenti wrote:
> Jordan Crouse wrote:
> 
> 
> > NAK.  What you are suggesting will completely breaking the entire Cimarron
> > infrastructure, which is not something I am willing to do at this stage.
> > Much time (and by that I mean nearly 4 years) went into writing, verifying
> > and validating this code.  We have a bug that needs to be fixed - and that
> > doesn't happen by completely removing the internal workings of the engine.
> 
> You make it seem like this code was the product of 4 years of refinement.
> In reality, the parts I proposed to refactor are one reason why it was so
> struggling.
> 
> Yes, this particular bug *could* be just fixed by adding yet another special
> case in the code.
> 
> But don't you see there won't ever be an end to this?  This is already the
> fifth or sixth serious amd_drv bug I fix in a short span of time.
> The more I look at the code, the more I'm convinced there are several others
> coming.
> 
> I can't even imagine how hard it would be to write this much code without
> even enabling compiler warnings, which I did a couple of months ago, after
> spending a day chasing a missing prototype.
> 
> What you call "verified and validated code", is actually a very fragile,
> complex set of ad-hoc checks and magic numbers.  The slightest environmental
> changes break it badly, as happened multiple times when I upgraded the X
> server from 1.1 to 1.3:
> 
> Debugging this class of problems, namely memory corruption, uninitialized
> values, and missing synchronization, is *extremely* hard and time consuming.
> I'm suggesting a way out...  In a matter of weeks rather than years.

There wasn't a single bug that you or anybody has fixed that has been the
fault of Cimarron.  Not one.  Stop mischaracterizing the situation.
If you want to rewrite the driver and the engine, then please, be my guest,
but you'll be in the middle of it for several years, and it will continue
to be buggy long after you have given up and moved on to other hardware.
This is not what an OLPC representative should be proposing weeks before
the final images are due.

Jordan

-- 
Jordan Crouse
Systems Software Development Engineer 
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.