Re: what should bootstrap *really* do?

[DJ Delorie <dj at redhat dot com>]

> Oh.  So there was a bug that caused people to (reasonably) think
> that the intent of bootstrap was to be able to restart-in-middle,
> and at the same time the intent for most of the developer crowd(?)
> was not articulated through comments, documentation or otherwise?

Not quite.  If the original bootstrap failed, it left the build area
in an unknown state, and the only way to recover was either to clean
it and start again, or *really* know what you're doing.

If you're going to clean it anyway, it really doesn't matter what
"make bootstrap" does.

If you really know what you're doing, it also really doesn't matter
what "make bootstrap" does.

So the case that bootstrap needs to worry about the most is the people
who don't want to (or know to) clean it, but don't know how to recover
either.  Since the documentation advises *users* to use "make
bootstrap" to build the compiler, I expect their unvoiced expectation
that bootstrap is restartable to be significant.

As for developers, it seems they fall into two categories: those who
want bootstraps to be restartable, and those who don't.  The ones who
don't can simply run "make clean" or "rm *.o" (which they'd have to do
with the old bootstrap too), and the ones who do need lots of help
from the Makefile.