"Is it dead yet?"

[Robert Lipe <robertlipe at usa dot net>]

There have been a collection of recent patch threads that could get
paraphrased approximately like:

Kaveh> Tested by building cc1 configured as an i686-pc-linux-gnu ->
Kaveh> rosetta-stone-roman_numerals cross compiler.  The code clearly
Kaveh> doesn't work becuase it won't compile, contains syntax errors,
Kaveh> and other signs of terminal bit decay.

Law/RTH> Egad.  Now that's a configuration that isn't built
Law/RTH> often.  I'm surprised you ran into as few problems as
Law/RTH> you did.

For these ports that have clearly not compiled in a long time, is it
really worth keeping them alive?  I'm not suggesting we drop anything
we've seen any activity in, but I've watched these lists for a long time
and don't recall a single problem or success report on, say, clipper-*,
tahoe-*, pyr-*, or 1750-* in years.  If the code won't compile and
nobody has even noticed, it sounds like dead wood.

A quick check on some of those targets diffing against the initial "1.1"
version when EGCS was created shows nothing but bulk search and replace
kinds of fixes.

The GDB project has instated a plan to try to trim some of these out of
the code.   Does GCC have a similar plan?   Does it need one?

RJL