Re: Revised release criteria for GCC 4.0

[Steven Bosscher <stevenb@suse.de>]

On Tuesday 14 December 2004 21:33, Gerald Pfeifer wrote:
> On Tue, 14 Dec 2004, Steven Bosscher wrote:
> > In fact I think that getting release criteria so late in stage 3
> > is just silly and quite pointless
>
> Since the 4.0 release criteria shall serve as a template for the 4.1
> release criteria, I beg to disagree.

My "pointless" remark may be too strong.  When you have to deriving
release criteria based on an existing baseline (like, when you're in
stage 3 already) I guess there is not much more you can do.  Let me
say I'm quite happy that the secondary and primary platforms have been
updated.

Still, for the upcoming releases we should set goals for the releases
early on.  I realize this is hard.  But people rely on the judgment of
the RM and the SC.  If the release criteria for GCC 4.0 are a template
for GCC 4.1, I suppose our users should not expect too much of GCC 4.1.


> > especially now that they are in such a weak form and not very specific.
>
> In that past, we had much stronger criteria but basically ignored them.

I hope that the RM would just say "No!" to patches that don't satisfy
the release requirements for GCC 4.1.  If the release requirements are
set early enough to, say, judge on a branch being merged or not, it is
my opinion that the RM should have the power to say "No" to a branch
merge when mainline after the branch merge does not satisfy the release
criteria.  This was not possible in the past because release criteria
often were not available until very late in the release cycle.  When
the release criteria do not include performance (compile time and code
quality) requirements, the RM is left without power and I think we all
lose in the end.

Gr.
Steven