[Bug target/81084] [8 Regression] powerpcspe port full of confusing configury / command-line options not related to SPE

["glaubitz at physik dot fu-berlin.de" <gcc-bugzilla at gcc dot gnu dot org>]

https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=81084

--- Comment #44 from John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz at physik dot fu-berlin.de> ---
(In reply to David Edelsohn from comment #41)
> SPE mostly is a separate architecture that happens to share many of the
> basic mnemonics with PowerPC. Maintaining the SPE port was a burden to the
> Power/PowerPC maintainers. As discussed in the other threads, despite years
> of promises, the SPE port was not maintained, not even regular testsuite
> results. The communication mostly consisted of bug reports raised a year
> after the patch or release.

Those are apparent mistakes made in the past. I am happy to provide testsuite
results starting next week. As I said, gcc-8 is stable at the moment on real
PowerPCSPE hardware.

> In regard to IBM employee response to PowerPC targets older than Power8, you
> said yourself that these are IBM employees. They are directed to work on
> specific projects and patches.  Sometimes IBM developers can become too
> focused on the Power8 and later issue and include portability in their
> design, but IBM also is not a general support center for all PowerPC. IBM is
> a business.  As with all commercially-supported Open Source projects and all
> forms of work in general, some developers have broader interest in the
> project and others approach it as a job.

I understand how that works. No one is actually asking IBM people to fix
anything if they don't want to. But I have a problem with people removing
working code that people are using and then dismissing it with answers like the
one I received. It would be different if project X belongs to IBM.

One of such examples was that POWER5 support was forcefully removed by IBM
people from Golang. They claimed that this move was urgently necessary to
reduce maintenance burden. Yet all that was needed to get Golang working again
on POWER5 was to revert three patches and slightly modify them. I am still
rebasing it regularly without any problems.