To Steering Committee: RFC for patch revert policy (PR48403, bootstrap broken on many targets)

[Steven Bosscher <stevenb dot gcc at gmail dot com>]

Hello,

Revisions r171843, and r171845 broke bootstrap on many platforms, see
PR48403. The commit of r171942 was supposed to fix this problem, but
there are multiple reports that the problem is _not_ fixed for some
configurations.

This means that bootstrap has now been broken for three days on x86_64
and i686 targets, and a few others.

I would actually been in favor of reverting these commits _now_. This
is what has happened most of the recent times when bootstrap was
broken by a patch. But GCC policy is to allow for 48 hours before
reverting a patch, if "two people with write privileges to the
affected area of the compiler determine that the best course of action
is to revert the patch", whatever that means exactly. And even then,
reverting is not allowed unless "the original poster or any other
party [indicates] that a fix will be forthcoming in the very near
future".

In the PR audit trail, I've proposed to revert the patch, and HJ and
Benjamin are also in favor of that. In Benjamin's works: Bootstrap has
been broken for much too long, on all the common devel arches. Since
we have write privileges, I consider the 48hr clock running...

I would like to see the policy changed: Reverting patches should be
done much faster than 48 hours after everyone is fed up with waiting
:-) In these times of high network bandwidth, automated testers, and
bootstrap times that make it possible to bisect to revisions that
introduced a regression, 48+ hours is simply too long. Most of the
time this happens courtesy of the developer who introduced this bug
(see Vlad's recent IRA patch), but not in this case for whatever
reason.

My proposal would be: A patch may be reverted immediately by anyone
with SVN write access if bootstrap is broken for more than 24 hours on
any primary target. With proper notification to everyone involved,
obviously.

Thoughts?

Ciao!
Steven