Re: type consistency of gimple

[Michael Matz <matz at suse dot de>]

Hi,

On Mon, 14 Aug 2006, Mark Mitchell wrote:

> pressure build on some set of infrastructure until it has been painfully
> obvious for some amount of time that it has to change.  (In my
> experience, the same thing happens in developing proprietary software;
> convincing product management to let you spend significant time fixing
> something that's not on the next release's feature list requires some
> good salesmanship.)

How true :)  Nevertheless the goals for the FSF GCC should IMHO be purely 
based on rather technical arguments and considerations, not the drive by 
paying customers.  Normally we have the maintainer concept to guarantee 
some sort of that.  This obviously creates conflicts when maintainers 
having to accept the solution and developers creating that solution (for 
customers or driven by own demand doesn't matter) are the same people.  I 
think if in doubt the maintainer hat should win and I realize this is 
sometimes difficult (because the danger is that a feature will not be 
implemented at all if the customer isn't paying the cleanup, but the 
cleanup is the prerequisite to accept the feature).  I have no good 
solution for this, but I feel that rushing things in because of customer 
milestones or deadlines is the wrong thing (I'm not accusing you of 
rushing things).  Especially if most of the involved people agree on what 
is optimal on a technical basis nothing should prevent that from becoming 
implemented.


Ciao,
Michael.