Upstreaming very old changes

[coypu at sdf dot org]

Hi, GCC!

I believe netbsd is the primary user of the vax target. its status is:

good: netbsd uses gcc 5.4.0, and cross compiles its userland+kernel with
this. it runs and is also able to natively build useful programs like perl.

bad: -O0 in places, text relocations. obvious signs of more bugs not yet
investigated.

however, this is with a large diff to gcc. the author of most of the
changes is Matt Thomas, who is also the GCC vax port maintainer. the
biggest change is probably shared library support (... from 1998).

I'm not sure why he hasn't committed his work upstream, but it would be
nice to bridge the gap, to make it easier for anyone (possibly myself,
in some future time after education) to adapt the code to non-deprecated
GCC APIs.

legal - I don't think this is a real issue - most people involved have
already signed FSF paperwork, and there's commit history, so I can
explicitly ask all the people involved to state they are OK with it.

technical - I am not a compiler expert, and this is a large unexplained
diff. even originally, the commit messages weren't very verbose. It also
adds 20 years of effectively "merge local diff to head". however, the
end result does work well enough to boot, run, etc.

if I go down this road, how can I begin bridging this gap?

Thanks.