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Re: Ada policy
zack@codesourcery.com (Zack Weinberg) wrote on 30.08.04 in <87acwc3qq6.fsf@codesourcery.com>:
> That is a little different from 'a deliberate policy of breaking
> source compatibility between releases', I admit. I think that a
> reasonable person could reach that conclusion too, but only having
> read messages which I remember reading but cannot presently find in
> the archives.
Hmm. I certainly seem to remember reading those messages, too. Not that it
were a plan to always break compatibility, but that incompatible features
were pretty much always introduced and they wanted to use them in the
compiler, which then produced that incompatibility; and as long as the
previous version was still compatible, that was not considered a problem.
And that in fact only-the-previous-version had been true for a large
number of versions.
Hmm ... this seems relevant:
http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2002-03/msg01197.html
http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2002-03/msg01245.html
http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2002-03/msg01268.html
... and probably more in that thread.
It seems completely obvious from that thread that ACT's ideas of how much
old version bootstrap compatibility was worth, was vastly different from
either the FSF's, or the one described in the current thread (that is,
lots of old versions used to check exactly that internally).
Furthermore, there's mention of a plan to document which versions work for
3.1 or the next version. We have 3.4 out, and now it seems we finally get
such a list ...
(I wonder if I should also mention the "either take our contributions the
way they are, or we'll take our toys and go home" thing ...)
MfG Kai