Management of new ports

[Mark Mitchell <mark at codesourcery dot com>]

Giovanni --

On July 12th, you posted:

  http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2005-07/msg00483.html

asking about handing of new ports.

The SC has discussed the issue, at your request.  Fundamentally, the SC 
feels that this issue is outside its purview as a "board of directors" 
 for GCC; this is an issue for the technical management of GCC (i.e., 
maintainers) to decide.

Other than that conclusion, the rest of this email is just my summary 
and opinion, not an official SC statement.  Where I say "we" I'm talking 
about my perception of an informal consensus of people that participated 
in the discussion, not an official dictate.

In general, we think that wall new ports with active maintainership 
sould be accepted, if the ports meet our technical criteria.  However, 
we also recognize that reviewing new ports is hard, and time-consuming, 
and that reviewers are volunteers, and so that may not happen very 
quickly.  We are not in favor of "auto approval".

You mentioned that you submitted a patch to update the technical 
requirements for ports to say that cc0 ports would not be accepted, etc. 
 Personally, I think that's entirely appropriate.  The SC doesn't want 
to be involved in making such a list, or approving it; that should be 
done by consensus of the maintainers.  But, this conclusion should 
remove the objection that "there is no official statement on this".  You 
should probably also mark the appropriate macros, etc., in the internals 
document as deprecated.

--
Mark Mitchell
CodeSourcery, LLC
mark@codesourcery.com
(916) 791-8304