Re: Bernd Schmidt, release manager for GCC 2.95.3

[Joe Buck <jbuck at racerx dot synopsys dot com>]

Bernd Schmidt writes:

> Here are the criteria whether or not a given patch will be accepted:

In addition to the criteria that Bernd lists, we want to avoid any patch
that breaks C++ binary compatibility with gcc-2.95.2.  We already have three
different incompatible C++ compilers in common use on GNU/Linux: egcs-1.1.2,
gcc-2.95.2, and what I'll call gcc-2.96RH.  We want to avoid creating one
more; for one think, picking the shared library numbering would be very
tricky for an intermediate bug-fix version.

Unfortunately, that makes it very hard to fix the vtable-thunks problem.

> Other than the gcc regression testsuite, I can build and test a number of
> programs across a set of platforms.  I'd like to get suggestions as to which
> programs we should use for this, and on which platforms to test.  Preferrably
> this should be packages that come with built-in testsuites.  Here's a list
> of programs I plan to test on the machines available to me:
> 1. SPEC95 (mind that we are not primarily interested in performance for this
>    release, but we should be able to compile this set of benchmarks
>    correctly).

As long as you are going to build SPEC95, we should make sure, at least,
that 2.95.3 does not have a significant performance regression with
respect to 2.95.2.

> 6. We'll need a C++ program or two.  I'm open to suggestions.

GNU Octave (use version 2.0.16, the latest).  It's the GNU project's
Matlab replacement.  It has a test suite, also, there's lots of info
at http://www.octave.org/ .