Re: patch/proposal: obsolete configurations in 3.1

[Hans-Peter Nilsson <hp at bitrange dot com>]

On Mon, 15 Apr 2002, Mark Mitchell wrote:
> --On Monday, April 15, 2002 07:57:53 AM -0700 "David S. Miller"
> <davem@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> >    From: Mark Mitchell <mark@codesourcery.com>
> >    Date: Mon, 15 Apr 2002 07:22:25 -0700
> >
> >    Instead, I believe that there should
> >    be active development of new code for something approximating
> > production    use by a relatively large number of people.
> >
> > I'll go out on a limb and say that there are probably more people
> > using the PDP10 stuff than MMIX. :-)
>
> Indeed.
>
> Had it been up to me, I would never have allowed the MMIX port to
> be included in GCC.  I'm a huge fan of Knuth, but I'd much rather
> we not be saddled with updating the MMIX port whenever we make a
> change to GCC.
>
> Oh, well....

About that, let me just say I'm glad to see that others don't
share your view.

My 2 \"ore on the general subject of the number of ports being a
burden: I believe a general bug like in
<URL:http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2002-04/msg00872.html>
would have remained much longer without the MMIX port, to be
seen for other targets only in large machine-generated codes.

To wit, more ports help fixing target-independent gcc bugs, if
nothing else than by exposing them.  The cost of keeping the
port up-to-date falls on the maintainer and should IMHO not be a
major subject when considering accepting a port in FSF sources.

Generic let's-change-some-target-macro-or-internal-interface
changes could supposedly be delegated to each port maintainer:
"Here's the patch that I committed for the main stuff and the
foobar port.  Gentlefolk, please tweak your ports accordingly."

brgds, H-P