Re: patch/proposal: obsolete configurations in 3.1

[Phil Edwards <phil@jaj.com>]

On Mon, Apr 15, 2002 at 07:22:25AM -0700, Mark Mitchell wrote:
> 
> I'm going to take a position here that I'll likely get flamed for, but
> so be it.  The mere existence of hardware or an emulator for same does
> not mean that GCC should support that target.  Neither does the existence
> of a set of users for that target.

A related observation:

We've had one or two complaints about the large size of the source
tree downloads; the bulk was not in the multiple front-ends or runtime
libraries, but the size of config/* for all the back-ends.  We've made
available different tarballs for different language combinations, but Ye
Olde x86/Linuxe Usere must still download configury for all the platforms
we might possibly support.

The cleanup of config/* seems to be proceeding well.  If the bits become
unentangled enough, it would be nice to consider separating tarballs along
platform lines instead of / in addition to language lines.

Maybe have something like "if you're just going to be building a native
compiler for our 3 most popular platforms, grab these tiny tarballs,
else grab the whole thing."


The cleaner config/* might allow users interested in oddball platforms
to more easily distribute support for those cases:  "Go get GCC,
then download this tarball, which unpacks a new config directory in
gcc/config/stone-knives-and-bearskins."

Phil

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