Re: GCC 3.0 Release Criteria

[Mark Mitchell <mark at codesourcery dot com>]

>>>>> "Bryan" == Bryan W Headley <bheadley@prismalink.com> writes:

    Bryan> Next thing is: use Linux 2-2-14 as the criteria? Let's get

I'm happy to use a different kernel -- but I think it should be a
known stable kernel that can be run in place of the kernels shipped
with the supported versions of the RedHat and Debian distributions
without too much hassle.

It's hard enough to ask people to actually try running a new kernel on
their machines -- that pretty much means they have to not care if the
machine gets hosed.  And, I don't want to ask GCC testers to be
tracking down kernel bugs at the same time as GCC bugs.  I picked
2.2.14 because it shipped with RedHat 6.2, I believe.

In other words, the purpose of this exercise is not to ensure that the
latest pre-release kernel and the GCC 3.0 optimizers play nicely
together -- it's to ensure that the GCC 3.0 optimizers work.  If
2.2.14 and GCC 3.0 are not likely to work (because 2.2.14 did not work
well with GCC 2.95.2), then I agree that a prerelease for a stable
kernel is probably appropriate.

Independently of which kernel version we choose for testing, I would
certainly encourage the kernel folks to test their prereleases with
development snapshots of current GCC.

--
Mark Mitchell                   mark@codesourcery.com
CodeSourcery, LLC               http://www.codesourcery.com