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Re: GCC 3.0 Release Criteria
>>>>> Martin v Loewis writes:
>> IMO we should test instead just for Linux
> You cannot do that. There is not "just Linux". For a strict criterion,
> you'd have to say something like "we require it to work on the
> computer of Andreas Jäger, on the evening of the release". That is
> something that gives a clear yes/no answer.
> Of course, if it works on the evening of the release, and nothing is
> changed, it probably works also the next day. Also, when the computer
> of Mark Mitchell has the same Linux version installed, it probably
> works on his computer as well. If I have a *different* version of
> Linux installed, it may fail for me, but work for you - maybe it is a
> bug in the kernel, or a glitch in the C library that causes it to
> fail. If you have different Linux distributions, there is no 100%
> guarantee that it works on all of them if it works on one of
> them. That makes it a bad release criterion: If it fails for 1 person,
> but works for ten, on identical compiler sources - to release or not
> to release? Perhaps that person just had misconfigured the compiler,
> or there is a serious problem. To reproduce it, you have to know
> *exactly* what operating system was used.
But you might face the same problem with any distribution:
Distribution makers release updates and bugfixes and AFAIK Debian
doesn't have a static distribution but still changes. Therefore if
you say distribution X, you still have to say e.g: The original
distribution without any updates and without any self compiled
packages. And if you do this, you can say directly any linux system
with glibc 2.1.3, Linux 2.2.14 headers etc.
Btw. for gcc 2.95 we just tested on bootstrapping on linux.
> Of course, Linux will be a supported platform, anyhow.
There's no arguing about this,
Andreas
P.S. Martin, my name is Jaeger - without an Umlaut.
--
Andreas Jaeger
SuSE Labs aj@suse.de
private aj@arthur.rhein-neckar.de