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Re: Release numbering
On Mon, 30 Aug 2004, Gabriel Dos Reis wrote:
> Or 6.0. Or whatever. We never sworn carret diagnostics for 4.0.
> Not just because we can't implement carret diagnostics now means we
> should not reject the "huge perturbation" in the next release.
We can also implement them incrementally under -Wcaret (say) and improve
the precision of the location information passed to diagnostic functions,
message by message, to make them more useful. (After adding testsuite
support for testing the precise character at which a diagnostic is given.)
No need to avoid implementing something because of version numbers if the
usual principles of incremental development and avoiding big incompatible
changes are followed. Changing the default, if desired, would be an
incompatible change, but one only needing -Wno-caret added to tools
parsing output, and there would probably have been a few releases in which
the -Wno-caret option existed but was the default, serving as due warning
to tool maintainers, before any such change.
I believe in incremental improvement and avoiding big incompatible
changes.
I don't care about whether the version number is 3.5 or 4.0 or 5 or 2005
or any other variation someone wants to invent, as long as the version
numbers stay monotonic increasing.
--
Joseph S. Myers http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~jsm28/gcc/
http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~jsm28/gcc/#c90status - status of C90 for GCC 3.5
jsm@polyomino.org.uk (personal mail)
jsm28@gcc.gnu.org (Bugzilla assignments and CCs)