Re: Patch to generate gcc.1 from invoke.texi

[Richard Earnshaw <rearnsha at arm dot com>]

mark@codesourcery.com said:
> The primary problem is that people are busy doing other things, which
> isn't their fault.  I think that this stems to some extent from the
> fact that, while many organizations are paying for GCC support and
> development, very few are paying explicitly for work in the FSF
> development tree.  That means that other trees are regularly
> stabilized towards a release, but that happens less often in FSF tree,
> because the same resources are not available there.


It's not for me to tell you how to manage the project, but I'm a little 
surprised you haven't explicitly called a feature freeze (or even a 
stabilization freeze).

My biggest concern about open-source projects is that as soon as the 
branch is made everyone will ignore it and concentrate on getting their 
latest cool idea into the code-base; given that we can't force people to 
work only on stabilizing the branch we can encourage them to do so by 
preventing the new sexy features from being added until after some of the 
existing problems have been sorted out.  A bit of the carrot and stick 
approach.

I'm not advocating that we should spend months in a feature freeze 
(probably just a few days), but if it would help to concentrate minds I'd 
be all for it.  A reasonable (and measurable) goal that could be set would 
be that all primary and secondary platforms should at least survive a make 
bootstrap at the time the branch is made.

Just adding my 2c worth.

R.