Re: gcc 3.5 integration branch proposal

[Jan Hubicka <hubicka@ucw.cz>]

> On Tuesday 13 January 2004 01:23, Ziemowit Laski wrote:
> > On 12 Jan, 2004, at 16.18, Steven Bosscher wrote:
> > > On Tuesday 13 January 2004 01:11, Ziemowit Laski wrote:
> > >> On 12 Jan, 2004, at 15.49, Mark Mitchell wrote:
> > >>> Apple (and some other vendors, including CodeSourcery) is in the
> > >>> position of doing its own release management and bug-fixing based on
> > >>> various versions of GCC.  Therefore, having high-quality FSF releases
> > >>> may not make much of a difference to Apple; Apple doesn't use it
> > >>> directly anyhow.
> > >>
> > >> And the reason we don't is because the FSF keeps shooting down our
> > >> patches.
> > >> You just can't have it both ways.
> > >
> > > And Apple keeps ignoring existing infrastructure.  I understand the
> > > inconvenience for you, but you should _fix_ patches, not force in.
> >
> > Please explain what you mean by 'infrastucture' and just how evil Apple
> > is ignoring it.
> 
> Not evil.  I never said that.  I wish I had an Apple.  Ask Pinski,
> he knows ;-)
> 
> What I mean is that most patches I've seen so far were shot down on
> technical grounds, on bad timing (stage3), for not using existing
> functions to perform certain actions (feedback-based prefetching), 
> apparently patents (?) for hot/cold, etc.

One of causes of this is the fact that we happent to conflict in an
efforts (prefetching, new inlining were both developed independently
twice).  This is real shame as many of features Apple compiler has would
be very, very nice to have in mainline but merging is getting
increasingly dificult.
It would be great to simply use FSF CVS branch for Apple enhancements
and post patches to gcc-patches as they are being developed or released
to public.

That would make it much easier to notice such an infrastructural
conflicts much earlier.  I know I can watch Apple's CVS (is there some
mainling list?) and I will try to do it in future, but it would be
easier if this went in as other patches commonly do.

Honza
> 
> >  Also please explain how to fix patches that were shot
> > down _on principle_, such as my recent AltiVec work.
> 
> That's a language issue that I have no opinion on other than that I
> think it would have been wise if Motorola had consulted language
> lawyers, but that's the past.  Others seem to have them.  Do you
> think branching 3.4 will suddenly make these people change their
> mind?
> 
> Gr.
> Steven