Re: Radical proposal: skip 3.4

[Jan Hubicka <hubicka at ucw dot cz>]

> So, stage 3 is taking too long.  But it's not reasonable to release 3.4 
> with this number of regressions, as nobody will use it.
> 
> So let's just skip 3.4.  Fix as many regressions in 3.3.3 as is 
> reasonable and release it.  Meanwhile, start stage 1 of 3.5, merging in 
> only apparently regression-free patches.  Hopefully some of the 
> unsuitable-for-stage-3 patches will fix the remaining 3.4 regressions as 
> an incidental matter.
> 
> OK, so this is an absurd proposal, and I don't even really support it 
> actually, but it's food for thought.
> 
> Now for a more serious analysis.
> 
> Currently we have 132 bugs targeted for 3.4.0:
> ada: 2
> bootstrap: 8
> c: 9
> c++: 31
> debug: 9
> driver: 3
> fortran: 2
> java: 5
> libgcj: 5
> libobjc: 1
> libstdc++: 8
> middle-end: 1
> optimization: 21
> other: 4
> pch: 1
> preprocessor: 3
> target: 19
> 
> More disturbingly, 33 of these are wrong-code bugs.  I really don't like 
> releasing with wrong-code bugs.

There are only 38 bugs marked as critical, I plan to iterate over them
this week.  Last two weeks I was fixing bugs assigned dirrectly to me
and fixed about 5 or 6 of them with not very concentrated effort.
Assume that it is realistic to fix 10 bugs per week, so 4 developers
together can do it.  (well, this is probably little bit optimistic, but
lets see)

I really don't think merge of tree-SSA will make situation magically
better.  It won't reduce number of bugs and Tree-SSA is kind of starting
point for all the cool stuff, so it won't make us to concentrate on
release because there is nothing cool to do.

I also think that GCC 3.4 is important especially if we take into
account possible delays and usability problems with GCC 3.5 having even
more radical changes than 3.4 has.

Honza