SC issues revised

[Tom Lord <lord at emf dot net>]

When I brought up the SC issues, Joe Buck asked me to avoid discussion
except about specific goals and proposals.  That's sensible, and
that's I'm working on.

In general, I think that more money ought to be spent on GCC,
specifically to make improvements that are of a general nature --
valuable to everyone interested in GCC.  I think that the political
structure of project governance correlates directly with the
probability that such spending can occur: the SC has the opportunity
to define a framework that companies can pay into for general
improvements.

So I'm trying to build a list of specific technical goals that most
maintainers will agree are desirable, and achievable, but that aren't
currently likely to happen due to resource constraints.  I'd like to
test the waters with three of these:


	1. Continuous release management.

	   Changes to the trunk should not cause the trunk to vary
	   from a releasable, maximally tested condition.  At the
	   same time, this new constraint shouldn't slow down the rate
	   at which changes can be made, or make it too difficult to
	   make changes.

	2. Improved testing infrastructure.

	   The test suite should be complete enough that there is
	   little value in, say, running GCC through a proprietary
	   test suite.  There should be better support for testing for
	   performance regressions, both of the compiler and of
	   generated code.  There should be a (more complete) pool of
	   platforms dedicated to testing, and a queue to which
	   contributors can submit branches for testing.

	3. Deep architectural improvements.

	   I have heard, but don't fully understand the issues, that
	   GCC is noticeably far behind various proprietary compilers
	   in terms of the quality of code generated.  Some of the 
	   issues are "nobody has done much work on that target", but
	   some of the issues are "gcc would need deep, pervasive 
	   changes before it could include similar optimizations".
	   There should be support and resources for planning and
	   executing those kinds of changes.

-t