Re: Freeze timing and questions

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

    The point is to spend the next couple of months stabilizing the
    compiler.  That means that we find important bugs, from GNATS or
    elsewhere, and try to fix them.  It's OK if they're not regressions;
    now is a great time to fix that horrible bug that's been annoying you
    since 1996.  We are now, however, focusing on quality -- not new items
    for the 3.1 release announcement bullet list.

This is somewhat ambiguous as to what "important" means, but I'd
suggest a criteria that looks at the fix.  A local fix is acceptable
even for a minor bug, but fixes that are more complex or riskier for
some reason should only be done for more important bugs.

    This is OK, but at this point I think it is unreasonable to actually
    support Chill in 3.1; its status would be equivalent to the KDE
    patches in the contrib/ directory.

A trickier question is what about Ada?  Active work is under way to get
the current sources to work with 3.1, but so far the complete ACT test
suite has not passed on *any* target, though it's getting closer (probably
under a half dozen distinct problems on x86).  Since test suites for Ada have
not yet been set up in the GCC tree, there's a tradeoff between pulling over
all front-end changes from ACT, whether bugfixes or new features, which have
been heavily tested, or copying over just the bugfixes, resulting in a
source tree that hasn't been as tested.  My feeling is that the first is
best, at least for another few weeks or until the sources start passing
the complete test suite, but I'm not sure.