notes from gcc summit maintenance BOF

[Benjamin Kosnik]

>I suggest isolating the various subdirectories first, which would
>allow dealing with each subdir separately.  Probably some toplevel
>Makefile hack to detect which autoconf each subdir is using, and tweak
>the command lines accordingly.  We would need to get rid of the shared
>cache too.

Personally, I agree. I think the only way there is going to be forward
motion on this is if we can break it into smaller pieces. Doing
everything at once is a huge amount of work.

Both Phil and I have tried to convert libstdc++. There are some bits for
the new autoconf in comments, but I don't believe either of us got it
working.

>>     who will approve this patch?
>>     how long will this take?
>
>Those are the hard questions, especially since there are so many
>independent projects sharing the toplevel files.

Do we need a branch for the configure/make upgrade? That was the real
question. I think working on a branch could be avoided if independent
work on individual target libraries would be ok'd. Alexandre and others
have different opinions, however. And I've not really had that much time
to look at this for libstdc++ or libiberty, so I don't know. Supposedly
the autoconf bits are the problem, as host/target configure bits have
changed around.

In addition, Daniel J indicated that there was a patch posted to do a
bunch of this stuff, but it was unreviewed. Before we start working on
this (or dusting off that patch) we should probably figure out ahead of
time who does what, or at the very least.

best,
benjamin