Re: Proposed targets to obsolete for 3.5, first pass

[Ben Elliston <bje at au dot ibm dot com>]

Steven Bosscher <steven@gcc.gnu.org> writes:

> Instead I'd like to discuss a _policy_ for obsoleting targets,
> because what we do is really just randomly pick old targets and drop
> them.  GCC "supports" so many targets that some manufacturer or
> contractor company contributed and then basically left it as a
> maintainance burden on the rest of gcc that some set of rules is
> apparently necessary to prevent that from happening. We can't keep
> claiming to maintain all ports when the reality is that we have no
> way to know if the port still works.  For that, we need more active
> involvement from the target contributors and maintainers.

As I mentioned during the Steering Committee panel discussion, the GNU
tools should deprecate and obsolete targets in concert.  It doesn't
make much sense to retain binutils or gdb support for a processor
family if the compiler port no longer exists.  GDB tends to be the
project most trigger happy with targets and, if everyone were to agree
with their choices, could make target obsolescence faster/easier.

> I'll post a separate email with some proposed rules later today.

Did you, in the end?

Cheers, Ben