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Re: S/390 as GCC 4.3 secondary plattform?
Hi Robert,
On Mon, Oct 09, 2006 at 08:21:45AM -0400, Robert Dewar wrote:
> >In the criteria for primary plattforms I've read that primary plattforms
> >have to be "popular systems". Reading this as "widely used" I think that
> >this will be a requirement which mainframes are unlikely to meet in the
> >near future, so I propose to make s390 and s390x secondary plattforms for
> >now. I think this can be important to show users that gcc works reliably
> >on S/390 and that it can be expected to do so in the future as well.
>
> But how do you meansre "popular system" or "widely used". Number
> installed? Revenue from sales? Number of applications? Number of
> companies using the products?
The release criteria for gcc 4.2 say: "Primary platforms are popular systems,
both in the sense that there are many such systems in existence and in the
sense that GCC is used frequently on those systems."
That's why I didn't propose to make S/390 a primary plattform in the first place.
But don't get me wrong, of course I would love to see this happen and I'm sure
that our team here is able to provide the necessary support for S/390 as
primary plattform as well.
But first things first I considered it preferable to start with a smaller step
towards a secondary plattform.
The decision whether S/390 meets one or the other requirement for being a primary or
secondary plattform is of course up to the steering committee and I really hope
that they consider S/390 in one way or the other.
> I find that people are often likely to have VERY peculiar notions
> of the mainframe business, and indeed have met many who seem to
> think that mainframes have disappeared! Most extraordinary. The
> S/390 is still a very important system by any reasonable criterion,
> and likely to be for a while (when you call an airline, you are
> not talking to an application running on a Dell PC :-))
Not to mention all our bank accounts handled by S/390 systems and
nobody would probably like to see his money disappearing due to a gcc
bug miscompiling the banking application ;-)
> I would think it perfectly reasonable for the S/390 to be
> considered a primary platform on the popularity basis, but
> of course it has to have a level of support that is
> consistent with this. What *is* happening is that fewer
> and fewer people are aware of this technology, so free
> software support is what is likely to be available in
> the near future.
Thank you very much for your support. I'm looking forward to see how
the steering committee decides upon that.
Bye,
-Andreas-