On Fri, Jun 3, 2016 at 9:29 AM, Renato Golin <renato.golin@linaro.org> wrote:

On 3 June 2016 at 17:10, Rafael Espíndola <rafael.espindola@gmail.com> wrote:
> Do keep in mind you are comparing a 11 year old project and a 11 month
> old one. There is a lot more churn on the 11 month old one.

LLD is at least 5 years old. Every time you re-write it doesn't reset history.


> Again, I am truly sorry we were unable to come up with a perfect
> design the first time. For the record, I don't think it is perfect
> yet. There will likely be more big changes to lld. That is the cost of
> trying to build as good a linker as we can.

This is not about what you do. It's about *how* you do it.

We have developers trying to create a linker. They are working on LLD
because Chris wanted a true LLVM linker. But it seems that you want a
project that you can do whatever you want, whenever you want.

This is *NOT* open source. Right now, LLD is *nothing more* than Rui's
and Rafael's pet project. I cannot recommend Linaro to collaborate on
those terms, and I sincerely recommend anyone that is listening to
this thread to not do so either.

Renato, it is not appropriate to call it my and Rafael's pet project. First of all, Rafael and me are working on it for different purposes and probably have different visions (although our taste on good code and good design seems similar.) I'm interested in using it in my company and on FreeBSD, for example. Rafael and I have no side channel to communicate, and we are just collaborating openly on this mailing list.

You overlooked a lot of contributions that has been made to LLD. George designed and wrote a great deal of relocation handling code and TLS optimizations besides other contributions. Peter came up with a different symbol table design, sent a proposal to the mailing list for discussion, and implemented it (even though Peter and I are working for the same company, that was not a coordinated effort, and the design change proposal was out of the blue to me. I was surprised by his improvement.) Simon implemented all of MIPS code that's pretty tricky. Davide is contributing to AArch64 and LTO. There are many more contributors. I'm truly respectful to all the contributors, and attributing these efforts to someone's pet project is honestly a bit insulting.

I have never declined contributions by saying that "I know better." I requested design documents (because I don't know better!) when contributors seem to be starting large design changes, but that was needed for discussion. If you want to do some large change, you want to convince other collaborators that your design will work. It is I think a usual process.

Needless to say, I don't think I (and Rafael) should get a special treatment. Both do not have right to submit without convincing other collaborators. For example, just last week, I sent a patch which I truly believed non-controversial and good one for review, and got rejected unexpectedly by Sean. I had to convince him. That's how it works.

I sincerely request you to retract your recommendation to not collaborate with us.

I'm not protecting what Rafael did. Rafael, even if you think your patch had less common with the patch that's under review, they overlapped each other with a great deal. Reviewing one patch and submitting a conflicting one at the same time is not an appropriate behavior, and I do understand why it disappointed Adhemerval and Renato. You needed to send it to review and explain yours if you believe yours is different and better.

> Being open source doesn't mean I get to implement what someone else
> wants. You are more than welcome to send patches, but they have avoid
> harming the rest of the linker. In particular, at this early stage
> they cannot harm its development. Once we have a mature project we can
> actually evaluate tradeoff.

We're clearly not welcome to send patches. We did, and you re-wrote it
and committed without asking the original author.

So, the plan is to wait for you to finish the initial implementation
alone? Again? What do we do in the interim? How many times are we
going to go through this?

I have waited 2 years before LLD was barely useful, then Adhemerval
implemented the AArch64 back-end. Then you destroyed and now we have
waited another year, but we're still unable to collaborate. If
anything, now it's even harder than it was last year.

Why can't we help with the design, too? We know about ARM and AArch64,
that's what we do, and we can provide you with the expertise without
having to go on your own doing everything. That is the whole point of
collaborative development, and it seems that you're missing this
point.


> And just like we did, you are more than welcome to try to write
> something better. Please let us know how it goes.

Is this the position of every LLD developer?

I cannot say about every developer, but at least to me, my answer is yes, of course.

Rui, Nick, Chris?

I'm seriously looking for others to chime in and let me know if that
is the final stance on LLD, so that I can finally write it off and go
work on another linker.

If the official position is that LLD is a project that only Rui and
Rafael can design and implement for another 2~3 years, I *cannot*
recommend Linaro and its members to participate.