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

[Joel Sherrill]

Joe Buck wrote:
> 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.
>   
I think that sounds reasonable.  This won't be
the last language, library, etc that will want to
move up in status.

--joel

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