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Re: Criteria for GCC 4.0
kaih@khms.westfalen.de (Kai Henningsen) writes:
> phil@jaj.com (Phil Edwards) wrote on 02.06.04 in <20040602190903.GA29825@disaster.jaj.com>:
>
>> I'm not arguing for /never/ having a 4.0 release (although others do take
>> that position, and it's a reasonable one).
>
> I'll say here that from where I sit, that doesn't strike me as
> particularly reasonable. More like the opposite.
It follows logically from the position that a 4.0 version number would
only be justified by actions we would never take.
I had considerable difficulty thinking of changes to GCC that would
justify a 4.0 version number to me. Here are two (and I hope everyone
agrees that we'd never do either):
- Dropping support for the C language (because everyone uses C++
anyway)
- Redesigning the machine description language, only updating the
x86 backend to match, then doing a release before anyone has had
a chance to update other backends.
And for the record, I now think the 2.95->3.0 version number bump was
*only* justified in order to extract ourselves from the corner we'd
painted ourselves into because EGCS internally considered itself to be
2.9[01].
zw
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