GCC 4.3 target deprecation proposals

[Manuel López-Ibáñez]

On 22/01/2008, Andrew Haley <aph@redhat.com> wrote:
> NightStrike wrote:
> >
> > I work for a company that makes significant use of gcc to target vax.
> > The people involved are users, not developers, of gcc.  Does any part
> > of the deprecation requirements take into account user base, or just
> > developer base?
>
> While the idea of weighing the user base when deprecating a target seems
> to make some emotional sense, it doesn't make any practical sense.  The
> compiler has to be maintained by someone or it will rot and cease to be
> buildable, then it won't be of any use to users anyway.  If there isn't an
> active maintainer we can't continue to include a target, no matter how many
> users it has.

I agree that weighing the user base doesn't make any practical sense.
But I can't understand the reason for removing something that works
fine because it may rot in the future. I understand that if you don't
get test results then you may assume there are no users. But if you
get test results and they are fairly clean?

Another different matter would be if there were a lot of test failures
and open bug reports. Then it will be fair to send all test-results
reporters and bug subscribers a message saying:

"If no one steps up to maintain this, the target will be removed in
the next release."

I would propose to send the message in stage1 (and probably at stage2
and stage3) and decide in stage3.

It will also be fair to suspend bugs for targets that have no active
maintainer with an appropriate message.

Cheers,

Manuel.