Re: GCC 3.3, GCC 3.4

[Michel LESPINASSE <walken@zoy.org>]

On Fri, Jan 31, 2003 at 05:28:39PM -0800, Joe Buck wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 31, 2003 at 03:11:56PM -0800, Tom Lord wrote:
> > Please see my reply to Kenner and Mark on the subject of better
> > alternatives.  
> 
> Claims that an alternative is better need to be backed up.  If your
> "continuous release management" scheme is better, please point to
> a sizable free software project that uses it.  If you cannot, then
> it may not be socially responsible to risk GCC for the sake of your
> experiment.

What Tom is arguing for reminds me a lot of what debian is doing with
its testing distribution. Their goal here is to always maintain one
software tree (testing in their case) in a close-to-releaseable
state. From what I understand, they're also pushing more in that
direction as time goes, for example there is an effort to keep the
boot-floppies up to date so they can install testing at any time,
rather than just rushing to make them work before a supposed release
date. As far as I can tell, this has been a very good model for Debian
since they adopted it. I understand it might be harder to adopt for
the GCC project, and in particular harder to automate, since there you
can not reason in terms of packages to move, but rather in terms of
branches to merge, which needs to be a manual operation.

Cheers,

-- 
Michel "Walken" LESPINASSE
Is this the best that god can do ? Then I'm not impressed.