From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Jeffrey A Law To: David Edelsohn Cc: Franz Sirl , rth@cygnus.com, egcs@cygnus.com Subject: Re: stabilization issues ppc-linux Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 23:58:00 -0000 Message-id: <18795.916012628@hurl.cygnus.com> References: <9901102304.AA26846@marc.watson.ibm.com> X-SW-Source: 1999-01n/msg00313.html In message < 9901102304.AA26846@marc.watson.ibm.com >you write: > in addition to freezes we need to be a little more aggressive about > reverting changes which break the compiler until the original author > corrects the error. We certainly reserve the right to do this. However, we don't want to do this without detailed analysis of the bug. It is wrong to remove code simply because it causes some code to fail. Before taking this kind of action we have to have a very clear understanding of the bug to be sure that removing a hunk of code is clearly the right thing to do. Anything less is just papering over a bug instead of trying to fix it. Take for example HJ's desire to turn off regmove in egcs-1.0.? because the compiler was aborting or generating incorrect code in certain circumstances. Turning off regmove would have avoided that instance of the problem, but it would have been absolutely the wrong thing to do since the problem actually had nothing to do with regmove. In fact, once we had a good handle on the problem it was fairly easy to construct a testcase which failed with regmove disabled. It has been my experience that when we analyze the bug, 99% of the time the person responsible for whatever the real problem is will fix it (if asked). jeff