Re: [RFC] Contributing tree-ssa to mainline

[law at redhat dot com]

In message <20040117171753.36031.qmail@web41106.mail.yahoo.com>, Dara Hazeghi w
rites:
 >1) A committment by people to fix regressions/bugs as
 >they appear, as opposed to right at the end of the
 >release cycle. Until a month ago, there were only
 >really 3 or 4 people actively fixing regressions on
 >mainline which is partly the reason branching for 3.4
 >has been so slow.
Red Hat's plan is to move to a tree-ssa based compiler as soon as it is
feasible to do so (and IMHO it is not feasible at this time).  We believe
that the tree-ssa infrastructure and the optimizations built around it are
critical to the long term relevance of GCC, particularly in the face of
customer demands for free development tools that compare more favorably
with the vendor tools.

With that in mind, I don't see any problem making a commitment for Red Hat
to addressing regressions, bugs and documentation issues -- simply because
it is in Red Hat's best interest to address those issues.

It has always been our assumption that such issues would initially fall
largely upon the shoulders of the tree-ssa team as the rest of the GCC
development community ramps up on the new infrastructure.

 >2) A general consensus that the mainline won't simply
 >be abandoned once the changes get merged in. With
 >new-ra for instance, we now have 2 register
 >allocators, and it doesn't seem like we can get rid of
 >either in the forseeable future (wasn't there a plan
 >to switch fully to new-ra at some point?).
In the immediate term, Red Hat's focus is on 3.4 and tree-ssa.  Mainline
will probably not be a focus for Red Hat's development efforts until such
time as tree-ssa is merged.

Jeff