GCC 3.4.4 Status (2005-04-29)

[Mark Mitchell <mark at codesourcery dot com>]

Now that GCC 4.0 is out the door, I've spent some time looking at the
status of the 3.4 branch.  As stated previously, I'll be doing a 3.4.4
release, and then turning the branch over to Gaby, to focus
exclusively on 4.0/4.1. 

The 3.4 branch is in pretty good shape, despite what Bugzilla might
lead you to believe.  There are a lot of regression reports (150) but
I've scanned through them, and most involve corner cases in some
pretty dark corners.  Even the 53 ICE-on-valid, rejects-valid, and
wrong-code cases are mostly very firmly in those categories.  A number
of these cases have patches that have already been applied to
mainline, and probably can be backported to the 3.4 branch relatively
easily.

In general, GCC 3.4.3 is working for people; the point of 3.4.4 is
just to get another round of bug fixes done.  We don't want to go to
heroic lengths to try to fix things, at the risk of destabilizing a
pretty good compiler.

Therefore, I plan to create a 3.4.4 RC1 in one week, on May 7th, with
a final release shortly thereafter, unless there are serious problems
discovered.  Speaking for myself, during this time, I plan to go
through the open reports, finding critical C++ bugs that I fixed, and
backport the patches.  I'd encourage others to do the same, and
to look in particular at wrong-code problems that affect your favorite
platforms.

--
Mark Mitchell
CodeSourcery, LLC
mark@codesourcery.com