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Re: Ada policy
Richard Henderson wrote:
On Mon, Aug 30, 2004 at 01:34:25PM -0700, Zack Weinberg wrote:
http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2004-02/msg00859.html
For the record, I completely agree.
Reading Zack's message:
Second, the Ada maintainers have said in the past that they
deliberately break source compatibility between releases (such that
GCC 3.x with Ada is only guaranteed to be buildable with GCC 3.(x-1)).
That's entirely wrong. Nothing is broken deliberately, and no one
ever said anything of the kind. What they did say is that it
is not always feasible to maintain what Zack would like:
There must be
guaranteed bidirectional source compatibility between all 3.x branches
of GCC, such that it is possible to build any 3.x version of GNAT with
any other 3.x version of GNAT.
Unfortunately there are occasionally cases where bugs cannot
be fixed without breaking this requirement. It's relatively
rare, and for some time now, GNAT has been able to be built
with a pretty significant variety of starting compilers,
though no one guarantees this to be the case (the only
guarantee is that it builds with the most recent release,
although in practice we have been using a much older
compiler internally for starting builds).
Note that this is particularly the case if the GCC community
decides to stick with 3.xx designations indefinitely.