There is no need to have a uniform policy about it. There is no
compelling reason to treat all such cases alike.
Consider the case of machines that are available for use: we don't
have to treat them all alike. We don't have to support all of them;
we support them when that serves our cause. If a machine is rarely
used and supporting it is a hassle, we can decide not to support it.
Likewise, when machines are not yet available, we don't have to
support them, but we should do it if that seems advantageous for our
cause. Rather than prejudging all such situations in a blanket way, I
would like you to judge the usefulness and the burden for each case,
and make an individual decision.
The only special issue raised by such a situation is how to maintain
the machine description. We could not maintain it. If the
manufacturer is going to maintain it, that solves the problem. So
perhaps the thing to do is to ask the manufacturer to commit to
maintaining the port it. Perhaps until the chip and manual are
available, or perhaps for as long as they want it to remain in the
distribution. Set whichever condition you see fit, and negotiate.
Allowing the change to go in is risky for other reasons. If the company
later decides that they won't release the chip ISA manual, even after the
chip is released, we are stuck with a major maintainence burdon.
We could always drop it if it becomes a burdon, so why worry too much
about whether this *might* happen?
We can also inform the company, now, that we would have to drop it if
it were not maintained. That could be part of negotiating with them
to get a commitment of support.
We could also ask them whether they plan to provide support for GDB
and the binutils, or when they plan to release the manual so that
others can do so. This too could be part of the negotiation.