Re: what should bootstrap *really* do?

[kenner at vlsi1 dot ultra dot nyu dot edu (Richard Kenner)]

    This of all those folks who have flakey problems that cause the build
    to fail at random.  

If they have "flakey problems", how likely is the bootstrap to succeed?
If you have flakey hardware, it seems to me the first step should be
to fix it!

    Think of people who want to report a problem, but the error message
    has just run off their screen.  Why should they have to restart
    bootstrap from scratch?  

They don't!  They can use "mae bootstrap2" or "make bootstrap3".  But when they
do this, they know they are doing something "nonstandard", so will do so
carefully.

    My (unproved) claim is that the number of people in this kind of
    situation surpasses the number of people who make a minor change here
    or there, that would require bootstrap to be restarted, so we should
    privilege this (alleged) majority with the default behavior of `make
    bootstrap'.

Are you *really* claiming that the majority of users who build GCC have
such flakey system that they can't complete a bootstrap without crashing?