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Re: Small update to reversed_comparison_code
On 13-Mar-2001, Mark Mitchell <mark@codesourcery.com> wrote:
> However, you are essentially arguing that if a patch tickles a latent
> bug, then it should go in anyway -- to incentivize people to fix the
> bug. That discounts the cost to the organization as a whole of not
> being able to build anything.
I'd just like to say that in my personal recent experience, this is
indeed costly -- not being able to do a full bootstrap & compare on
i686-pc-linux-gnu recently definitely slowed down my progress.
Not that I've been spending much time on gcc stuff recently,
but the time I spent on a recent very trivial change was way
out of proportion to the size and complexity of the change,
and difficulty in bootstrapping was a big factor in that.
This has also discouraged me from working on further changes.
> More concretely, if we cannot agree on policies that keep the tree
> working on major platforms most of the time, we are simply
> incentivizing interesting parties to fork, and work on their own
> stable development branches.
That has been exactly my reaction.
--
Fergus Henderson <fjh@cs.mu.oz.au> | "I have always known that the pursuit
| of excellence is a lethal habit"
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh> | -- the last words of T. S. Garp.