Re: Proposed gfortran development branch

[Toon Moene <toon at moene dot org>]

Richard Guenther wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 1:44 AM, Jerry DeLisle <jvdelisle@verizon.net> wrote:
> > Hi folks,
> >
> > In light of all the delays, I would like to propose that we create a
> > development / test branch for gfortran.
> >
> > We could then start committing all the pending patches and if mainline
> > ever branches, just merge back.
> >
> > This would allow us to make up for lost time, create test binaries for
> > the wiki and start getting some user feedback going on 4.5 features.
> >
> > I apologize if this seems a bit rebellious, but I do think it is within
> > current gcc rules and would help un-log the jam.
> >
> > All who agree, please reply "yea", those opposed, "nay".
>
> Note that merging the branch will be painful (as in, please dissect
> the branch into the individual patches again to make bisecting the
> trunk SVN possible).  Also the SC vetoed these kind of 'integration'
> branches in the past (to not encourage starting an effective stage1
> on a branch).

I agree about the bisecting-in-case-of-bugs issue.

However, what I see happening in practice is that all GCC developers 
keep on doing their development work on branches - only the gfortran 
developers are left out, because they do not have a branch.

Of course we can create branches for all the subprojects that are 
pending on the creation of a 4.4 branch and freeing up trunk - it just 
doesn't seem very efficient to us.

Of course I pleaded with the FSF (on the Steering Committee mailing list 
*and* the gcc list) for speed in the case of the 4.4 branch - in vain.

We might be heading for a fork a la the EGCS fork - and I don't like it. 
 It took a lot of effort (I was part of the EGCS cabal and I didn't 
even do a lot of that foot-work).

This has to be resolved in a short time.  Reading groklaw.net for 6 
years has convinced me that the smallest unit of time lawyers deal with 
is a month.

That's a *lot* of development time, software wise.


--
Toon Moene - e-mail: toon@moene.org (*NEW*) - phone: +31 346 214290
Saturnushof 14, 3738 XG  Maartensdijk, The Netherlands
At home: http://moene.org/~toon/
Progress of GNU Fortran: http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.4/changes.html