Re: Beyond GCC 3.0: Summing Up

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

    I think the biggest problem with your approach is priority inversion.
    I might be in the middle of fixing a complex problem and then another
    change may break the compiler.  Before I can do any further work on my
    code I have to break off, go and fix the problem you exposed (which
    may then throw up other problems) and then remember where I got to
    with the original problem.

Right.  The happened to me the other day when somebody broke things so
that building on Alpha produced a compilation error.  Luckily it was
trivial to fix.

But note that we're not talking so much here about a case where things are
broken enough to affect other work, but instead where there are a few
test case failures.

I agree that in the case where it stops work that the effect on priorities
in serious and that has to be factored into the timeline.