Re: what should bootstrap *really* do?

[Alexandre Oliva <aoliva at redhat dot com>]

On Nov 14, 2000, kenner@vlsi1.ultra.nyu.edu (Richard Kenner) wrote:

>     This of all those folks who have flakey problems that cause the build
>     to fail at random.  

> If they have "flakey problems", how likely is the bootstrap to succeed?
> If you have flakey hardware, it seems to me the first step should be
> to fix it!

Sometimes it is the OS that is flakey (MS-Windows comes to mind), and
some of us do test GCC on MS-Windows.

>     Think of people who want to report a problem, but the error message
>     has just run off their screen.  Why should they have to restart
>     bootstrap from scratch?  

> They don't!  They can use "mae bootstrap2" or "make bootstrap3".

They could if they knew about it.  Anyway, it's a fair assumption that
repeating the same `make' command that triggered the problem at first
will result in the problem occurring again, except in case of flakey
hardware.  If `make bootstrap' doesn't restart from scratch (i.e.,
with `make clean') or proceeds from the same stage, the problem won't
repeat, and, since we already have `make clean' for those who want it,
I'd rather have `make bootstrap' just proceed from where it stopped.

> But when they do this, they know they are doing something
> "nonstandard", so will do so carefully.

`make bootstrap' is non-standard, in the first place.  `make all' is
the standard way to build a program.  It's unfortunate enough that we
recommend a non-standard build procedure for GCC.  We shouldn't demand
users to learn about additional make targets.

>     My (unproved) claim is that the number of people in this kind of
>     situation surpasses the number of people who make a minor change here
>     or there, that would require bootstrap to be restarted, so we should
>     privilege this (alleged) majority with the default behavior of `make
>     bootstrap'.

> Are you *really* claiming that the majority of users who build GCC have
> such flakey system that they can't complete a bootstrap without crashing?

No.  I'm just claiming that there are more people who get in trouble
because of flakey hardware/OSs than because of making minor changes.

-- 
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