Re: GCC 4.2.0 Status Report (2007-02-19)

["Joseph S. Myers" <joseph at codesourcery dot com>]

On Mon, 19 Feb 2007, Mark Mitchell wrote:

> One of the key points behind these suggestions is that Red Hat and
> Novell plan to skip to 4.3 for their next releases, so we'll have a hard

>  By hypothesis, 4.1 is satisfactory (shipping with major GNU/Linux
> distributions, and widely used throughout the entire GCC community), so

I'm reminded of some predictions:

[07/08/05 22:36] <honza_away> hmm again we are in the 4.1 sucks, 4.2 will rock mode ;)
[07/08/05 22:37] <stevenb> honza_away: 4.1 will suck.
[07/08/05 22:37] <stevenb> honza_away: 4.0 pretty much rules, but that is because everyone uses it
[07/08/05 22:38] <stevenb> but no big distro will use 4.1

This is *not* the only such prediction for a previous release, by far, 
just the one I found quickest.  *All* releases seem to have the 
predictions that they are useless, should be skipped because the next 
release will be so much better in way X or Y, etc.; I think the question 
of how widely used a release series turned out to be in practice may be 
relevant when deciding after how many releases the branch is closed, but 
simply dropping a release series after the branch is created is pretty 
much always a mistake.  (When we rebranded 3.1 as 3.2 in the hopes of 
getting a stable C++ ABI, I think that also with hindsight was a mistake, 
given that the aim was that the stable ABI would also be the correct 
documented ABI but more ABI bugs have continued to turn up since then.)

In addition, the 4.2 release series serves the necessary purpose of 
providing deprecation warnings for incompatible changes in 4.3 (for 
example, the proposed diagnostics in 4.2 for extern inline in c99/gnu99 
mode); dropping a release series would require associated reversions in 
mainline and delays to changes needing deprecation periods.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com