Re: GCC 3.0 Release Criteria

[Trevor Yann <TYann at vet dot com dot au>]

A number of people have expressed concern about the support for
platforms that are not listed in the release criteria. I think that
there may be a way to include limited support for more platforms.

From http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-3.0/criteria.html:

GCC's performance on the he following platforms will not be required to
meet all the criteria mentioned in this document
before GCC 3.0 ships, but the performance on these systems will be
considerable interest, and it is likely that serious
problems on these platforms will delay the release.

If some unlisted (but widely used) platform had serious problems, I
would expect that these problems would be considered just as much as
those for "secondary supported platforms". It that case there is being
listed as a "Secondary Supported Platforms" does not imply any greater
support than for platforms that are not listed at all. 

Wouldn't it be better to list _some_ minimum level of support for
secondary platforms. Maybe it could be required that gcc can  be
bootstrapped. Or perhaps there could be be a subset of the test suite
that should be passed for all secondary supported platforms.

Recognising that no support guarantee can be made without someone
avaliable to do the work, I could be a requirement that all secondary
platforms have an associated sponsor. If the sponsor is unable to
provide the necessary support, the support for the platform will no
longer be guaranteed unless a replacement sponsor can be found.

Perhaps the paragraph above (from the GCC 3.0 Release Criteria page)
could be rewritten as:

GCC's performance on the following platforms is required to meet all
criteria mentioned in this document except the "Applications", "Code
Quality" and "Compile-Time Performance" criteria before GCC 3.0 ships.
Support for these platforms is conditional on the availability of
suitable sponsor (appointed by the release manager).



Trevor