Re: patch for -Wno-long-long and early GNAT compilers

[Zack Weinberg <zack at codesourcery dot com>]

On Mon, Mar 18, 2002 at 09:02:26PM -0500, Robert Dewar wrote:
> 
> With my FSF maintainer's hat on, I think the priorities from FSF's point
> of view are:
> 
> 1. Have the latest best version of the sources synchronized at gnu.org
> 
> 2. Make sure this latest best version is reliable testing against all the
> various test suites.
> 
> 3. Fixing bugs
> 
> I must say that Zack's concern (bootstrapping with old versions of the
> compiler or odd non-standard mixed versions of GNAT) is not even on my
> radar screen of priorities.

See, from my point of view, it falls under "Fixing bugs."  Bootstrap
failures are bugs.  Severe enough bugs, in fact, that we ask people to
back out changes that cause bootstrap failures, if they aren't fixed
in a very short time window.

I was frustrated because I and others were getting bootstrap failures,
and the position the GNAT maintainers were taking was that it didn't
matter because the configurations we were using weren't supported.
Since the previous official word had been that they *were* supported
although possibly not constantly tested, I felt bait-and-switch-ed.

Now it seems that we're getting somewhere on solving the real bug,
which is all I ever wanted.  I want to apologize for the nasty tone I
took in the earlier message.

There is still something I don't understand, though.  You've said over
and over that you can't devote resources to making the Ada front end
portable.  The implication is that it's too hard.  My experience over
in the C front end indicates just the opposite; we don't have trouble
maintaining buildability with ancient broken pre-standard compilers,
and simultaneously making use of modern constructs.  Why is the Ada
situation so different?

zw