bug with asm statment in egcs-1.0.2

[Jeffrey A Law]

  In message < 19980423094919.26728.qmail@md.dent.med.uni-muenchen.de >you write:
  > > No.  As I mentioned before.  1.0.3 is to fix problems for RedHat
  > > and that's it.  1.0.3 is already frozen unless RedHat runs into
  > > some kind problem in their final builds.
  > 
  > Sorry, but this sounds a bit worrysome.  There's _much_ more to egcs
  > usage than RedHat system builds.
Absolutely.  However, we have to make tough decisions about how
much time/effort to put into minor releases because each minor
release we do takes time away from getting egcs-1.1 ready.  Both
in terms of actually applying patches, testing, making releases
*and* explaining to folks why a particular bug isn't going to be
fixed in a minor release.

Furthermore, everyone has pet patches they want to get into the
minor releases.  How do you go about selecting one group of patches
over another?  Given time, I probably could have come up with
several dozen code generation/compiler abort issues.

The way this problem is solved is a minor release has a set of very
specific goals.  For 1.0.3 those goals were to be able to build
the RedHat 5.1 distribution.  Anything which does not directly tie
into those goals is rejected.

It's probably worth noting we really didn't want to make a 1.0.3
release in the first place -- we wanted to end-of-life the
egcs-1.0.x tree at 1.0.2.

However, strategically, the time spent getting egcs-1.0.x in good
enough shape to be included in the RedHat 5.1 release was time well
spent for the project.


  > bug (possibly with a 3-line patch) in 1.0.x now (with 1.1 unreleased,
  > and its release date understandably uncertain) causing, say, the Linux
  > kernel or glibc to be miscompiled, would you even consider be make an
  > egcs-1.0.x+1 release to fix it ?
We would *consider* it; however, the default action at this time will
be to fix it for 1.1 without making a minor release of 1.0.x.


  > If the answer is no, I would certainly not be in a position to
  > criticise that decision, however you should then clearly state that
  > bug reports for 1.0.x are useless (to me, this seems to be especially
  > true for C++ bugs).
I disagree totally about the usefullness of bug reports from 1.0.x --
just because we don't make a minor release to fix the bug doesn't
mean the bug report isn't useful.  It allows us to fix the bug for
egcs-1.1.

In the case of C++, quite a few of the bug reports are for things we've
fixed for egcs-1.1.  This tells me that we need to wrap up some of
the ongoing work, stabilize the tree and get egcs-1.1 out the door.
And (of course) spending time on egcs-1.0.x minor releases delays
getting egcs-1.1 out the door...

It should also be noted that nothing stops individual folks from
making their own minor releases.  If HJ (or anyone else) wants to
make egcs-1.0.3.1 and maintain it, we're not going to stop them.



jeff