GCC 4.0 Status Report (2004-01-05)

[Robert Dewar]

Giovanni Bajo wrote:

> This is where our disagreement is. You can rewrite as much as you like of GCC,
> but if there is something which makes the user unable to compile its code with
> the new version, while it works well in the old version, then it is a
> regression. As a user, I don't care if you rewrite everything or just keep
> fixing bugs.

Yes, I think we all agree with this. What Geert was saying is that there is
nothing particularly special about a bug you know about compared to one you
don't know about. For a user hitting the bug, it does not make much difference.
So it is not terrible to issue software with known bugs, since you are going
to issue it with unknown bugs in any case (unless you are doing really careful
safety-critical certification, but I don't think anyone could afford the
resources to certify gcc, I doubt it is even possible :-)