Re: bootstrap problems

[Marc Espie <espie at quatramaran dot ens dot fr>]

In article <flzobkoa44.fsf@sel.cmla.ens-cachan.fr> you write:
>Jan Hubicka <jh@suse.cz> writes:
>
>| This is definitly problem for people doing development on the mips machine
>| and is really unfortunate.  Jeffrey has suggested to revert the patch,
>| but I believe this is not best solution for few purposes:
>| 1) the patch is not buggy by itself in some point of view - just traps latent
>|    bug and as it is IMO good.
>
>This is not the first time this type of problem is showing up.
>
>I think, no matter how good is your patch, if it prevents people from
>bootstrapping and continuing their work then it ought to be reverted
>until a patch is found for the latent bug.

I would tend to disagree. I know of several platforms, including mips, where
those `latent bugs' have completely stopped development of code that uses
gcc... the compiler bootstraps, but the whole systeme (OpenBSD) has issues,
and it's hard to figure out exactly what's going on, or to extract a
suitable testcase.

Code that's added to the compiler that does more sanity checks of internal
rules is good.

If such code is removed because it breaks bootstrap, then those rules are
never fixed. In a nice world, they would be, but we don't live in a nice
world. Sometimes, this is the kind of thing you have to shove in people
face to make them act on it.

In my opinion, adding MORE sanity checks and fixing the issues would go
a long way in establishing a better reputation for gcc...