Re: Freeze timing and questions

[Mark Mitchell <mark at codesourcery dot com>]

--On Monday, December 17, 2001 12:49:02 PM +0000 Richard Kenner 
<kenner@vlsi1.ultra.nyu.edu> wrote:

>     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.

I do not think there is any benefit to trying to define this too precisely,
but what you say makes sense.

I do not want to over-constrain people.

Ideally, I think, people would go through GNATS and fix things that they
think they are able to fix.  That is what I plan to do personally, with
the time that I have available.  Reviewers should in general discourage
fixes of the form "the register allocator was broken, so I wrote a new
one" preferring, instead, "the register allocator did not correctly
handle multiple abnormal critical edges in a flow graph; fixed thusly".

>     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

I believe that we have already agreed that Ada will not be part of
this release.

Therefore, I think the Ada people should be free to do whatever they
like, so long as it does not affect other languages.

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