consequence of 4.0 release branch?

[Toon Moene]

François-Xavier Coudert wrote:

>>> What does this mean for testing patches?  Does a fortran patch
>>> require testing for both mainline and the release branch?  I'll
>>
>> Yes, this is how it's supposed to work for all patches.
> 
> I don't know how I feel about that. We're having trouble keeping a 
> minimum speed in fixing gfortran bugs. Basically, double testing will 
> mean greatly diminishing the number of bugs that will get fixed in a 
> given amount of time.

Be careful.  You look at the problem from the point of view of someone 
who recently joined the bug-fixing crowd.  In a month's time, the 4.0 
branch will be *very* different from mainline.  It might be that patches 
to the front end still apply cleanly, but they might have different 
effects, exhibit latent bugs, etc.

In the 7 years I've been involved with egcs/gcc development based on 
CVS, I've *always* tested a patch that worked on mainline against the 
"branch du jour" of the next release before committing there.  It pays 
in the long run.

-- 
Toon Moene - e-mail: toon@moene.indiv.nluug.nl - phone: +31 346 214290
Saturnushof 14, 3738 XG  Maartensdijk, The Netherlands
Maintainer, GNU Fortran 77: http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/g77_news.html
A maintainer of GNU Fortran 95: http://gcc.gnu.org/fortran/