Please help merge the major changes

Please help merge the major changes

[Richard Stallman]

EGCS was started to provide a test-bed for trying out new features in
GCC and bringing them up to snuff.  It has done this job well, and
some major features are considered solid and ready to go into GCC 2.

Enabling EGCS and GCC 2 development to work together is extremely
important for the GNU project.  So I'm looking for volunteers to help
with this job, by identifying these major features (one by one), and
helping to get them installed.  Would you please send me email if you
can help?

If you would be willing to help, if only some obstacle or difficulty
did not exist, please talk with me anyway--even if you think it is
impossible to do anything about the difficulty.  Perhaps I can find a
way to bypass it.  This work is so important for the GNU project that
I would like to have a chance to try.

In the mean time, please slow down on adding new major changes to
EGCS.  It is hard to aim at a moving target.  Please give the people
working on the merging a chance to catch up.

Re: Please help merge the major changes

[Fred Fish]

> In the mean time, please slow down on adding new major changes to
> EGCS.  It is hard to aim at a moving target.  Please give the people
> working on the merging a chance to catch up.

Just out of curiosity, why?  The CVS repository contains an entire
progression of EGCS source trees, from the time the project was
started, until now.  Anyone wanting to start with the most recent
tagged source tree, or any intermediate source tree, can just do
merging work directly from that by checking out a copy with the
appropriate tag and ignore any changes after that date.

-Fred

Re: Please help merge the major changes

[Richard Stallman]

      The CVS repository contains an entire
    progression of EGCS source trees, from the time the project was
    started, until now.  Anyone wanting to start with the most recent
    tagged source tree, or any intermediate source tree, can just do
    merging work directly from that...

You're right that CVS helps here.  Making changes in EGCS today won't
interfere with the specific job of merging a certain change that was
present in EGCS yesterday.  But the issue at hand goes beyond that.

Right now, certain features in EGCS are mature and it's time to put
them into GCC releases.  But there will be more in the future.  In
addition to moving certain changes to the GCC release now, we need to
have a smooth flow of changes from EGCS to GCC releases over the long
haul.

Re: Please help merge the major changes

[Joe Buck]

> You're right that CVS helps here.  Making changes in EGCS today won't
> interfere with the specific job of merging a certain change that was
> present in EGCS yesterday.  But the issue at hand goes beyond that.

Yes, we must decide what to merge and how.

> Right now, certain features in EGCS are mature and it's time to put
> them into GCC releases.  But there will be more in the future.  In
> addition to moving certain changes to the GCC release now, we need to
> have a smooth flow of changes from EGCS to GCC releases over the long
> haul.

CVS provides a good mechanism for doing this.  This mechanism is already
demonstrated to be working in the EGCS tree, with 1.0.x managed for
maximum stability (it is considerably more stable than 2.8.1 and vastly
more stable than the gcc2 snapshots) without interfering with the main
development branch.

What we should work towards is this: EGCS and GCC share the same
CVS development tree, and what we are now calling the stable EGCS
branch should be called GCC.  The simplest way to do this is to
merge GCC into EGCS, not to try to extract EGCS pieces for movement
into GCC.