Re: Beyond GCC 3.0: Summing Up

[Mark Mitchell <mark at codesourcery dot com>]

--On Tuesday, July 10, 2001 6:51 PM +0100 Richard Earnshaw 
<rearnsha@arm.com> wrote:

>> However, that decision should be made independently.  If a patch breaks
>> ROMP, we should ask if we still want to support it.
>
> And, ideally, such decisions should be made public (either by posting to
> gcc-announce, or by a statement in the release notes of a preceding
> release).  Then someone who really needs such support has the opportunity
> to step forward with either time or money as the case may be.

Yes.  It is too casual to decide that, say, we should drop support for a 
platform simply because we are too lazy to fix a latent bug or three and 
have a patch that is otherwise useful, but triggers the bug.  Desupporting 
a platform is a decision that should not be taken lightly.

I think saying that we have no XYZ maintainer, so we don't care about XYZ, 
isn't really the right way to make the decision.  It might be that we 
should collectively maintain XYZ for a while, until a maintainer is found. 
If that
just requires fixing the odd bug every now and then, it's not like we can't
do that.  The question is how important we perceive XYZ to be, and how much
work is required.