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Re: patch/proposal: obsolete configurations in 3.1



I'd like to take a middle position in this argument.

It seems to me that as long as a port has active maintainers that it 
is eminently reasonable to include it in the FSF GCC distribution. 
If it doesn't have a maintainer or an active community of users, then 
we should feel no compunction about dropping it from the distribution.

In the case of the PDP-10 port, there are some real benefits that 
will accrue from having GCC support.  The PDP-10 port will find (and 
hopefully fix) places where assumptions conserning

	- byte size (8 bits - DEC-10 supports bytes from 1..36 bits long!)
	- uniform pointers (DEC-10 has 3 different pointer formats)

It also gives us another example port to look at when trying to 
figure out how to accomplish things for a new port with some strange 
architectural features.

-- Al


At 7:22 AM -0700 4/15/02, Mark Mitchell wrote:
>>>pdp10-*
>>>
>>I wouldn't advise dropping the PDP10, since it is making a resurgance due
>>to the emulators that have become available. I believe this target is
>>actually fairly new.
>
>I'm going to take a position here that I'll likely get flamed for, but
>so be it.  The mere existence of hardware or an emulator for same does
>not mean that GCC should support that target.  Neither does the existence
>of a set of users for that target.  Instead, I believe that there should
>be active development of new code for something approximating production
>use by a relatively large number of people.  (People can always maintain
>their own GCC port to any chip they like, but I don't think the FSF
>should do so.)
>Obviously, this is a grey area, but I can't imagine the PDP-10, even
>in emulation, being used for new development.  (I do know that people
>are running real applications on these emulators, but my understanding
>was that many of these were old accounting applications for which the
>source was no longer available.)
>
>--
>Mark Mitchell                   mark@codesourcery.com
>CodeSourcery, LLC               http://www.codesourcery.com


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