[patch] releases.html

[Colin Howell <chowell at redhat dot com>]

Hi there,

I've been doing some historical research on early GCC releases, and I
believe I have enough information to extend your release timeline back 
to the beginning.

Since the ChangeLog entries in the 1.x releases only go back to 1.17,
I had to use archives of the info-gcc and bug-gcc mailing lists to
determine the release dates of older releases.  These archives can be
found at:

http://www.geocrawler.com/lists/3/GNU/358/0/
http://www.geocrawler.com/lists/3/GNU/356/0/

They are not complete, but they do appear to have all the messages in
both lists from 1987, which turns out to be the period of interest.

It would be nice if gcc.gnu.org had complete archives of these lists.
Unfortunately, geocrawler.com was the only place I could find archives
going this far back.  The GNU website and their mail archive site
don't have archives of these lists at all.

Most of the release dates were taken from announcement messages posted 
to the info-gcc mailing list.  Two of the dates are a bit iffy.

GCC 1.9 was never officially announced; I derived its release date
from the announcement message for GCC 1.10, which included diffs
between GCC 1.8 and 1.9 and between 1.9 and 1.10.  The dates on the
diffs indicate a release date for 1.9 of August 18, 1987.  (The last
change from 1.8 to 1.9 and the first change from 1.9 to 1.10 both
occurred on that day.)

GCC 1.11 was announced late.  The announcement message went out on
September 18, 1987.  However, RMS admits in the message that he "may
have forgotten" to announce it, and messages to bug-gcc on September 5
and September 8 show that GCC 1.11 was already out by September 5.

GCC 0.9 was never announced on the info-gcc and bug-gcc mailing lists.
However, it was announced on the comp.compilers newsgroup as a "beta
test release", and that is where I got the release date from.  The
announcement message can be seen in the comp.compilers archive at:

http://compilers.iecc.com/comparch/article/87-03-013

Messages on info-gcc and bug-gcc in late March also talk about the
beta and about "gcc 0.9".  Hence I have identified GCC 0.9 with this
beta release.

Enough explanation.  Here's the proposed patch to the release
timeline.

Index: releases.html
===================================================================
RCS file: /cvs/gcc/wwwdocs/htdocs/releases.html,v
retrieving revision 1.11
diff -c -2 -r1.11 releases.html
*** releases.html	2001/02/01 17:50:10	1.11
--- releases.html	2001/02/13 03:19:45
***************
*** 145,148 ****
--- 145,167 ----
  <tr><td>1.18</td><td>February 4, 1988</td></tr>
  <tr><td>1.17</td><td>January 9, 1988</td></tr>
+ <tr><td>1.16</td><td>December 19, 1987</td></tr>
+ <tr><td>1.15.3 (g++)</td><td>December 18, 1987</td></tr>
+ <tr><td>1.15</td><td>November 28, 1987</td></tr>
+ <tr><td>1.14</td><td>November 6, 1987</td></tr>
+ <tr><td>1.13</td><td>October 12, 1987</td></tr>
+ <tr><td>1.12</td><td>October 3, 1987</td></tr>
+ <tr><td>1.11</td><td>September 5, 1987 (announced late)</td></tr>
+ <tr><td>1.10</td><td>August 22, 1987</td></tr>
+ <tr><td>1.9</td><td>August 18, 1987 (never announced)</td></tr>
+ <tr><td>1.8</td><td>August 10, 1987</td></tr>
+ <tr><td>1.7</td><td>July 21, 1987</td></tr>
+ <tr><td>1.6</td><td>July 2, 1987</td></tr>
+ <tr><td>1.5</td><td>June 18, 1987</td></tr>
+ <tr><td>1.4</td><td>June 13, 1987</td></tr>
+ <tr><td>1.3</td><td>June 10, 1987</td></tr>
+ <tr><td>1.2</td><td>June 1, 1987</td></tr>
+ <tr><td>1.1</td><td>May 24, 1987</td></tr>
+ <tr><td>1.0</td><td>May 23, 1987</td></tr>
+ <tr><td>0.9 (first beta release)</td><td>March 22, 1987</td></tr>
  
  </table>