[PATCH] Temporarily enable ac_fold_checking for --enable-checking=yes.

[Mark Mitchell]

Richard Guenther wrote:

>> Maybe we could have one or two people running autotesters with lots and
>> lots of checking turned on, and then reinforce the idea that a solemn
>> responsibility of contributing GCC is fixing regressions that you
>> introduce?
> 
> And I am definitely against this.  I would even make our current rules
> stricter and require bootstrap even for frontend-only changes.  Automatic
> testing is cheap - even if it takes a while.  Going through testresults,
> filing
> bugs and going after the people that introduced them is not.
> 
> Let's not waste other peoples time for the sake of your own ease.

I didn't make a very concrete proposal because I'm not sure I have a
very good one to make.  I certainly agree with you that people are a lot
more expensive than computers.

But, I hope you don't think that this is just me being selfish.  It
could be that I'm a lot less good at multitasking than you are.  But, I
really do think that throughput (total changes we can make) is somewhat
affected by latency (speed at which we can make a single change).

I think it's reasonable to do some cost-benefit analysis.  For example,
we'd probably agree that testing that caught one bug every 100 years but
which took up 99% of our testing time would not be worthwhile to impose
on everyone.  So, it's not an absolute thing; we should be looking for a
way to do testing that delivers most of the benefit with only some of
the cost.

I think not bootstrapping for a front-end change is a reasonable
tradeoff.  I think not running tests on multiple platforms when making a
small change to the middle-end is a reasonable tradeoff too.  Maybe we
should add more testing than we're doing to reach an optimal point;
maybe we should be doing less; maybe we should be shifting the testing
load around in some way.  I don't know.  But, I wanted to raise the
general issue and to express concern, in the context of discussion about
a change that might add an hour to the bootstrap-test cycle time.

-- 
Mark Mitchell
CodeSourcery
mark@codesourcery.com
(650) 331-3385 x713