Re: GCC 3.3 release criteria?

[Janis Johnson <janis187 at us dot ibm dot com>]

On Tue, Jan 07, 2003 at 02:40:00PM -0500, Craig Rodrigues wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 07, 2003 at 11:36:22AM -0800, Janis Johnson wrote:
> > 
> > If you've successfully built something that's not listed and should be,
> > please write up a guide about how to do it, patterned after the others.
> 
> Why is it necessary to write build instructions for all these packages?
> I've sucessfully built GNU Emacs, the Linux kernel, and ACE.
> All those packages are on the GCC 3.1 release criteria web page and omitted
> from the test web page.  Alll those packages have sufficient build instructions 
> on their own web pages or within their own documentation.

During the stabilization period for GCC 3.1 I spent a lot of time
looking through web pages and installation documentation for several of
the release criteria documents.  It was a major pain, so I wrote build
and test guides for packages that didn't have them.  I think I tried
building ACE but gave up.  I recently tried building a newer version of
Qt but gave up, not wanting to spend an unknown amount of time getting
through configuration problems.  I suspect that there are other lazy
people like me who are more likely to build these packages if there are
easy, consistent instructions for doing it, along with estimates of how
much disk space and time it requires.

The Linux kernel isn't on the list in testing/, but there's a bullet
item for "the operating system kernel you normally use" if it's compiled
with GCC, along with encouragement to make sure it boots and is usable.

GNU Emacs could be on the list; it's easy to build for anyone familiar
with builds of other GNU projects.  Simply building something doesn't
usually find problems, though; actually running tests for them is much
more valuable.  If there are automated tests for Emacs then I can see
including it, or recommending that Emacs users build it and use it.
That's kind of included in the "applications that are important to you"
item.

Thanks for bringing up these issues, Craig.  I'd like to hear what other
people think about them, too, particularly with a new release coming up
soon; we ought to be finding and fixing as many bugs as possible in 3.3.

Janis