Re: Public History of the GCC project

[James Michael DuPont <mdupont777 at yahoo dot com>]

> You *do* know that they're already on the web, right?
> Including the CVS logs.
Yes, I have learned a lot from reading the cvs change logs.

The first copyright I found is 1986/1987 on the ccpp program.

The first change log I found in 
http://subversions.gnu.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs/gcc/gcc/gcc/ChangeLog.0?rev=1.1&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup
>Wed Dec 21 02:46:34 1988  Richard Stallman  
>(rms at sugar-bombs.ai.mit.edu)
>	* Version 1.32 released.

And the first version appears to located here :
http://www.mit.edu/afs/athena/astaff/reference/4.3network2/usr.bin/gcc/cc1/?M=A

> Indexing there might be best, if nothing else because the
> cross-reference can be easily shared.  Classic web-indexing is
> done on-site by htdig (see <URL:http://gcc.gnu.org/search.html>)
> and off-site by google, altavista and others.

Yes, But they don't contain the entire history. 
It starts in 1997 on the web,
http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/1997-09/
ftp://gcc.gnu.org/pub/gcc/mail-archives/1997/

On Geocrawler there is references back to 03/31/1987 23:53:31,
that is ten years of mails:
http://www.geocrawler.com/archives/3/358/1987/
But I dont know where these are stored on the gcc site.

Also the htdig is very hard to use. :(
They are good, but it would be faster to index it myself,
for finding the information I need.

The first mention of the gcc I can find is here: 
Wed, 22 Apr 87 18:23:28 EDT  From:  smv@necis.NEC.COM 
http://compilers.iecc.com/comparch/article/87-04-014

and here 
http://www.gnu.org/bulletins/bull3.html#SEC9
in June 1987. 

The release table here shows  
(0.9 (first beta release) March 22, 1987)
http://gcc.gnu.org/releases.html

The google archive does archive the mailing list,
it is quite good, you are right :
if you search with : "site:http://gcc.gnu.org";

But it would be great to show each function and file from the gcc and
what mail references it. That would greatly help the understanding of
the source code. That can best be done by having both the Source, the
CVS and the mailing list locally.

Such a report can show who is the contributor on a function basis, and
which areas of the compiler have been worked on the most.
At least to be able to quickly find relevant emails, it would be great
to index and weight the data given a list of the identifiers in the gcc
source code.

Of course this is not that easy, but attempts can be made.

Best Regards,
Mike

=====
James Michael DuPont
http://introspector.sourceforge.net/

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