Re: Beyond GCC 3.0: Summing Up

[Mark Mitchell <mark at codesourcery dot com>]

--On Sunday, July 08, 2001 08:34:06 PM +0000 Richard Kenner 
<kenner@vlsi1.ultra.nyu.edu> wrote:

>     Sure and that's a concern, you definitely want to try to avoid
> frustrating     developers, but you also have to be sure not to frustrate
> users. There's a     balance there, and leaving a major target broken for
> an extended period of     time does not constitute an appropriate balance.
>
> But a key point is who are the "users" here?  I'd argue that the
> "users" are in fact the set of developers since they are the people
> who mainly use the top-of-tree sources.  So what we're doing with the
> proposed approach is frustrating one group of users in favor of another.

Yes, but if, say, IRIX 6.5 is broken, and a developer who works on the
Java front-end on an IRIX box cannot work without manually reverting
a bunch of patches, and who may not even known what has gone wrong, then
you've frustruated GCC developers too.

This horse is not just dead.  It has been buried.  Then, it has
decomposed under the assault of millions of microbes.  The microbes are
dead too.  The water in the dead microbes has evaporated and rained
down on high mountains, washed to the sea, and evaporated again.  Some
of it is now floating in outer space having somehow escaped the 
gravitational pull of the small blue-green planet on which we write 
compilers and is now floating somewhere beyond Pluto.

Clearly, we cannot reach consensus here.  We will have to let the SC
make an executive decision.

-- 
Mark Mitchell                mark@codesourcery.com
CodeSourcery, LLC            http://www.codesourcery.com