Re: Makefile change to restart bootstraps

[Alexandre Oliva <aoliva at redhat dot com>]

On Nov 13, 2000, kenner@vlsi1.ultra.nyu.edu (Richard Kenner) wrote:

>     I thought about that, but I rejected it because there may be times
>     when you don't want to restart the bootstrap, but proceed from the
>     stage in which you are.  But that may work, indeed.

> And what are those times?  Aren't every one of those cases places where you
> are asking for trouble by not recompiling everything with the new
> to-be-tested compiler?

I can see it's advisable to do it when testing GCC, but remember that
these rules are also for people who're going to build GCC to use.
They used to get quite frustrated when `make bootstrap' re-started the
build pretty much from scratch, and it would be quite annoying to have
the bootstrap restarted just because you tweak something in a config.h
file.

Since I don't like the idea of having rules for releases different
from those for CVS tree, I'd rather keep the Makefiles as
user-friendly as possible, even if this requires us developers to
slightly change our habits.  I disagree the change that was installed
is any worse for developers tan the previous set up used to be, it's
just different, and most people tend to see the way they're used to as
better than other alternatives that could work as well for them.  I
think this is one such case.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva   Enjoy Guarana', see http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Red Hat GCC Developer                  aoliva@{cygnus.com, redhat.com}
CS PhD student at IC-Unicamp        oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist    *Please* write to mailing lists, not to me