Rescue of prehistoric GCC versions

["Eric S. Raymond" <esr at thyrsus dot com>]

I have been able to rescue or reconstruct from patches the following
prehisoric GCC releases

gcc-0.9
gcc-1.21
gcc-1.22
gcc-1.25
gcc-1.26
gcc-1.27
gcc-1.28
gcc-1.35

gcc-1.36
gcc-1.37.1
gcc-1.38
gcc-1.39
gcc-1.40
gcc-1.41
gcc-1.42
gcc-2.1
gcc-2.2.2
gcc-2.3.3
gcc-2.4.5
gcc-2.5.8
gcc-2.6.3
gcc-2.7.2
gcc-2.8.0

The gap in the sequence represents the beginning of the repository
history; r3 = gcc-1.36.

The 0.9 to 0.35 tarballs can be glued to the front of the
history, one commit each, with a firewall commit containing a deleteall
to keep the content from leaking forward.  This is an issue because
the early parts of the repo don't have complete trees.

I'm now testing a conversion on the Great Beast that puts these in
place. If all goes well I will push this capability to the public
conversion repository later today.

You can audit the reconstruction process by reading the script I wrote
to automate it:

https://gitlab.com/esr/gcc-conversion/blob/master/ancients

Unfortunately, I was only able to find valid patch chains to three
releases that don't have complete tarballs.

If anyone else can scrounge up materials that could help complete
the fossil sequence, now would be a really good time for that.  We
have only three days at most left to integrate them.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>

The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to
escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.
       	       -- Marcus Aurelius