RFC: GCC 4.4 criteria - add Fortran as primary language?

[Joe Buck]

On Wed, Feb 20, 2008 at 02:27:27PM -0800, Tim Prince wrote:
> Joel Sherrill wrote:
> >Tobias Burnus wrote:
> >>According to the GCC 4.4 Release Criteria,
> >>http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.4/criteria.html, only C and C++ are primary
> >>languages. And thus only C and C++ regressions can be release critical.
> >>
> >>I propose to add Fortran to these languages. Reasons:
> >>
> >>- Fortran is relatively widely used; while C/C++ is wider used,
> >>distributions and to a lesser users compile also libraries such as BLAS,
> >>LAPACK etc. which are written in Fortran
> >>
> >>- gfortran has few (known;-) regressions. Currently, PR33296 and 
> >>PR32841.
> >>  
> >My first thought is does gfortran support and have
> >similarly good test results on all primary and secondary
> >platforms.
> How would anyone judge this, except by referring to gcc-testresults?
> gfortran developers have cleared up a number of secondary platform 
> problems whose counterparts have been allowed to remain in the "primary" 
> language.  In my experience, this supports the "actively maintained" point.

Maybe there could be a "semi-primary" or "experimental primary" status;
a feature could be treated as primary, but with the understanding that
the requirement will be waived if it causes excessive delay.  The
"experimental" label could be dropped after a few successful releases.