Re: gcc 3.5 integration branch proposal

[Daniel Jacobowitz <drow at mvista dot com>]

On Mon, Jan 12, 2004 at 07:05:54PM -0500, Daniel Jacobowitz wrote:
> "Same high quality"?  I know you're aware of them, but you might want
> to revisit the reasons that _no vendor_ I know of in several years has
> shipped an FSF released compiler. Even Debian, which is chronically
> short of the talented manpower required for compiler development, ships
> fifteen hundred lines of GCC patches plus a bleeding edge 3.3-cvs
> snapshot last I checked.  The people with real budgets, like SuSE and
> Red Hat, have orders of magnitude more changes.
> 
> I suspect the primary users of the release tarballs are roll-your-own
> developers (mainly either embedded or need-a-newer-C++) and large site
> installations (universities, corporate, etc.) who have a stable
> existing OS with an older compiler.
> 
> Obviously we want higher quality releases.  But now that CodeSourcery
> is doing the exact same thing as all other vendors, I'm sure you can
> see why it happens, and holding off releases isn't going to help
> anything.  My utterly unqualified instinct says that postponing the
> release branch isn't going to help, since developers and vendors have
> absolutely demonstrated their willingness to work outside of the trunk.

That message came out a whole lot meaner than appropriate.  I'd like to
apologize to Mark.  No one can dispute that we're doing a whole lot
better than we were before, and the quality of GCC releases is
improving.

However, extending Stage 3 to meet quality goals is not the way to
accomplish further improvement.  Especially not when we had some
high-profile problems with patches not getting reviewed at the end of
Stage 2.  I think we need to cut our losses and move on, and despite
the defeatist tone of the first third of this sentence, I think that
will still leave GCC 3.4 as an improvement.

Speaking just for myself, watching var-tracking not get reviewed
repeatedly was a really depressing experience, since the patch
motivated me to finish GDB support for the new debugging information. 
It's going to be a real user-visible quality-of-experience improvement
when it goes in.  The longer Stage 3 drags on, the longer you have to
use a SuSE (?) vendor compiler to get it.

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz
MontaVista Software                         Debian GNU/Linux Developer