Richard Kenner writes:
Zack Weinberg writes:
ANY kind of batching is unacceptable. Each individual patch needs to
be submitted for review by its original author, reviewed in public,
and checked in by itself. This is the commit policy which every other
contributor to GCC adheres to. I do not see why the Ada front end
should be a special case.
It has very different properties in terms of the way work is done on it
than any other part of GCC.
...
(1) The set of people who modify it is very localized. There are
extremely few (perhaps no) people on this list outside of ACT/ACTE
who are knowlegable enough to make Ada front-end modifications (I'm
talking here about the Ada part and not including myself in that set
despite being part of ACT). There would be nothing gained by making
patches available for "review" on this list, since there are few, if
any, people on the list that could review them.
It does not matter how few people are qualified to review patches for
the Ada front end. The requirement is that patch review occur in
public. I am assuming that there is an internal review process; all
we are asking is that you do that on an open mailing list so that
others can observe.
(I would support the establishment of an ada-patches@gcc.gnu.org
mailing list so that people who don't care can tune out, as is done
now for Java and libstdc++.)
(2) Because Ada users are very conservative, they are not using
recent versions of GCC and the front-end developers must do their
testing on the GCC versions being used by the people who report the
bugs. Since committing the patch to the FSF tree requires testing
using the latest version of GCC, that doubles the testing time. For
the other front-ends, developers mostly use the head version of GCC.
This turns out not to be the case. I can speak here for
CodeSourcery's customers only - many of them are still using 2.9x era
GCC for C and C++. And that does mean we have to test patches against
the version they're using, then again against mainline, and yes, that
does double testing time. We do it, because that's what the community
expects and requires of us. The same is expected and required of the
Ada developers.
zw