Re: GCC 4.3.0 Status Report (2007-06-07)

[Brooks Moses <brooks dot moses at codesourcery dot com>]

Mark Mitchell wrote:
> I am aware of three remaining projects which are or might be appropriate
> for Stage 1:
[...]
> In the interests of moving forwards, I therefore plan to close this
> exceptionally long Stage 1 as of next Friday, June 15th.  The projects
> named above may be merged, even though we will be in Stage 2 -- but no
> other functionality of Stage 1 scope may be included after this point.

An additional project, which is not on your list and perhaps should be:

Several members of the GFortran team (primarily Chris Rickett and Steve 
Kargl) have been working on a project to add the BIND(C) functionality 
from the Fortran 2003 standard.  This provides for a standard means of 
linking Fortran code with code that uses standard C linkage conventions, 
as well as adding some other useful features.

This work has been done on the "fortran-experiments" branch; my 
impression is that it is essentially ready to go into the review 
process, though there may be some small final bits of debugging 
remaining to be done.  I've cc'ed this to the fortran@ list for comment 
from the people working on it.

I don't believe this project has been documented very well (if at all) 
on the standard Wiki page for Stage-1 projects, but I haven't looked at 
it in a while.  I am also not entirely certain whether this qualifies as 
a Stage 1 or a Stage 2 project, since it produces fairly pervasive 
changes but only within the Fortran front end (and libgfortran library); 
however, the assumption on the Fortran list has been that it ought be 
merged during the Stage 1 period.

In any case, I very strongly believe that this should be included in 
4.3, and would hope that if the review process takes a couple of weeks 
that it can still be merged in.

> I am also considering a "lockdown" period beginning June 15th during
> which we would go into a regressions-only mode (other than possible
> merges of the functionality above) in order to begin eliminating some of
> the problems that have come in with the exciting new infrastructure.
> Any comments on that course of action?

IMO, for the Fortran front end, "regressions-only" is an inappropriate 
criterion for this sort of mode, given that the front end does not have 
a long history for the wrong-code and ICE-on-valid bugs to be 
regressions against.

Thus, at least for the Fortran front end, I think that a "wrong-code, 
ICE, and regressions" limit is much more appropriate, with an 
understanding that the spirit of the thing is to avoid large risky 
patches even if they meet the letter of that criterion.

However, with that caveat (and with the presumption that the BIND(C) 
projects gets merged in), from a Fortran perspective I would agree that 
this is a good idea; the bug numbers have been creeping upwards of late, 
and could use a coordinated effort at reductions.

- Brooks