Re: GCC 3.3, GCC 3.4

[Devang Patel <dpatel at apple dot com>]

On Friday, January 31, 2003, at 08:48 AM, Mark Mitchell wrote:

> I completely agree that more automated testing, and non-automated
> testing, would be extremely helpful.
IMO, now we need to establish it as a kind of requirement to
ensure good progress on future release. Even though this is
volunteer work, IMO vendors need to provide hardware for testing
if they use GCC as main compiler on their system.

Someone mentioned in this thread earlier that it is not straight
forward to setup this even if hardwares and bandwidths are available.
In this case, I think, we need to allocate some serious time on it.

> I also agree that more bug-fixing
> would be good; right now we *know* about a lot of regressions -- but
> we don't have fixes for most of them.  Architecture cleanups that make
> it harder to introduce bugs also help a lot.
IMO we need to change our thinking as far as regressions are
concerned. We can not continue development if we continue to
address regressions as part of life and find ways to live
with it. IMO, we need to start thinking in terms of zero
regression.

IMHO, We also need to allocate some time or even one minor release
to address regressions only. Only regression fixes are allowed
and no other check-ins are allowed (even cosmetic changes like
fixing spelling error comment) during this period. (We need to
stop the bus, check and fix oil leak and then continue even
though we are late.)

Another thing, IMO we need to do is to look at the pace of development.
More then 1400 checkins (total count from gcc-cvs mailing list) in
this month only!. PCH and new C++ parser are major new items but
they did not contribute large portion of this commits count. And
somebody pointed earlier that we have fixed 20 regressions from 3.2
and introduced new 29 regressions in 3.3. So we are working harder
but IMO, we need some discipline to take advantage of our hard work.

> If people have concerns about how I'm doing my job, I want to hear
> them.
I really appreciate what you're doing, but (:-)) GCC project will
benefit more if you become little be more strict about regressions.

I know this is volunteer work so one has to adjust to it, but
these are my thoughts.

-Devang