Re: GCC 4.5 Status Report (2009-09-19)

[Dave Korn <dave dot korn dot cygwin at googlemail dot com>]

Richard Guenther wrote:

> The trunk is in Stage 1.  Stage 1 will end on Sep 30th.  After Stage 1
> Stage 3 follows with only bugfixes and no new features allowed. 
> Stage 3 will end Nov 30th.

  I don't think this is the best time to do that.  Trunk's been broken most of
last week and will probably not be buildable for at least several days yet, so
a big chunk of that warning period is going to be useless to many people.

> We've been accumulating quite a number of P1 bugs.  Entering Stage 3
> should allow to improve considerably here in a short time.

  So aren't we now likely to lose the first few days of what little remains of
stage 1 waiting for trunk to start working again, then have a mad rush of
people falling all over each other to get their new features in in the last
couple of days?  One of which will inevitably break trunk again and block all
the others and then stage 1 will be over and it'll all be too late?

  Ten days isn't even that much warning in the first place; it's less time
than you'd generally let elapse before pinging a patch.  Can I at least raise
the suggestion that a plan that might work well would be for us to go slush
for however long - less than a week, I'd suppose - it takes us to get trunk
really properly stable, and then push back the end of stage 1 by that amount?

    cheers,
      DaveK