what should bootstrap *really* do?

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Nov 14, 2000, Hans-Peter Nilsson <hans-peter.nilsson@axis.com> wrote:

> Anything other than nil as the initial state for end-users running
> bootstrap is adding trouble.

This of all those folks who have flakey problems that cause the build
to fail at random.  Think of people who build GCC on MS-Windows.
Think of people who want to report a problem, but the error message
has just run off their screen.  Why should they have to restart
bootstrap from scratch?  My (unproved) claim is that the number of
people in this kind of situation surpasses the number of people who
make a minor change here or there, that would require bootstrap to be
restarted, so we should privilege this (alleged) majority with the
default behavior of `make bootstrap'.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva   Enjoy Guarana', see http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Red Hat GCC Developer                  aoliva@{cygnus.com, redhat.com}
CS PhD student at IC-Unicamp        oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist    *Please* write to mailing lists, not to me