Re: Problem with the fix to PR 10234

[Janis Johnson <janis187 at us dot ibm dot com>]

On Thu, Apr 03, 2003 at 05:27:56PM -0800, Joe Buck wrote:
> Once again:
> 
> I wrote:
> > > The fix to PR 10234 was erroneous.  Sorry I missed it, but it should
> > > have been closed as "not a bug".  The fact that the URL printed by
> > > released compilers for bug report instructions points to
> 
> > > http://www.gnu.org/software/gcc/bugs.html
> > > 
> > > and not to gcc.gnu.org was something that RMS asked for and that the
> > > SC agreed to.
> 
> On Wed, Apr 02, 2003 at 03:40:50PM -0800, Janis Johnson wrote:
> > Shall I revert these?
> 
> We heard back from RMS.
> 
> RMS still wants all GNUware to point to http://www.gnu.org/software/xxx
> (though there's a proposal to use xxx.gnu.org for all major tools and
> this may happen in the future).  So the decision is that we need to
> revert, at least for now.  He wants all the tools to follow a consistent
> policy, so we might be able to change it to the way many would prefer
> at some future point (at which time there would be a gdb.gnu.org,
> binutils.gnu.org, etc, though these might just be virtual hosts).
> 
> Please adjust all references in the documentation and GCC itself
> accordingly.  This has to be done before any new release.  Sorry.

Joe,

I understand the desire for consistency among the components of the
GNU Project.  It's vitally important, though, for GCC to provide URLs
that can be accessed reliably.  I'd like to push back on this before
reverting the patches.

The changes to the ICE messages in the active branches were made after
http://www.gnu.org/software/gcc/ was inaccessible for a few days.  Some 
people who saw ICE messages and couldn't access the URL cared enough to
track down the problem and report the bad link; others probably gave up
and didn't find the page at the GCC site and we missed out on receiving
problem reports.

I don't know of other cases when the GCC pages have been inaccessible
from the GNU site, but quite frequently we get complaints about the web
pages at http://www.gnu.org/software/gcc being out of date.  Usually
they are updated every few days, but sometimes they lag much further
behind the pages at gcc.gnu.org, where updates are visible immediately.
The page referenced in ICE messages, bugs.html, was updated April 2 but
the update is not yet available at the main GNU site.

Before changing back the URL in ICE messages I'd like to know what the
problems were that caused the old URL to get only blank pages for a few
days, and to have some assurances that the URL can be accessed reliably
in the future.

Janis Johnson
GCC Web Pages Maintainer