Re: Beyond GCC 3.0: Summing Up

[kenner at vlsi1 dot ultra dot nyu dot edu (Richard Kenner)]

    The real point is that any reasonable process here requires some
    centralization of decision making on whether patches need to be reverted
    because of overall judgments covering all targets. 

Right, and that's an issue because the GCC development process, by
definition, does not have a single person involved in the decision process.

    Yes, it works fine to have a community of developers sharing
    development in a relatively uncontrolled manner. That's the way we
    work internally at ACT, and really in terms of the development process
    itself, it makes very little difference whether we are talking about
    paid employees of ACT working on GNAT internally to ACT, or volunteers
    working on GCC (some of whom are of course paid to do this work by
    their respective companies). 

That's true, but a major distinction is that ACT has to continually
have a working compiler ready to be given to supported customers
potentially every day, while that is not true at all for GCC and only
even mildly true for the release branch.

How serious a regression would be to an ultimate user is the most
important issue for GNAT, but for the non-release branch of GCC, the
more relevant criteria is how much the regression will affect other
developers.