[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 #48 from John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz at physik dot fu-berlin.de> ---
(In reply to Segher Boessenkool from comment #47)
> Believe it or not, but the rs6000 port maintainers *care* about older
> systems.

Then why is something that is still working and being used by people being
deprecated?

> I wanted to obsolete SPE support because it is a big burden, not in small
> part
> because no one maintains it.  This has been going on for years and years.

In what sense? Care to elaborate? I thought the codebase has already been
separated out so it doesn't bother the rest of the code base. As mentioned
above, it would be nice to be pointed to an actual problem the code is causing
right now as-is.

> Big pushback; people still want SPE, they just don't want to spend work on
> it.

So, does every gcc user also have to be a gcc developer? I think the number of
people using gcc is magnitudes larger than the people capable of working on the
gcc codebase. So I think this argument is a bit unfair.

> Well neither do we, it's been enough.  So I spent a week splitting off the
> port
> (also tested removing VSX etc.; removing unused code does not take that long;
> I just have no way to *test* it so that was not included).  It was agreed the
> powerpcspe port would be maintained or it would be removed.

Ignoring that there are people still using it.

> Now a year later GCC 8 is on the horizon, and the powerpcspe port is still
> not
> maintained.  And the RMs decided to give it *another* year: it is not removed
> but merely obsoleted.

Why not leave it in as long as it works and it's being used? Mark it as
unsupported, broken or wontfix, but please don't remove it.