From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 23140 invoked by alias); 4 Oct 2002 01:48:11 -0000 Mailing-List: contact gcc-help@gcc.gnu.org; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: Sender: gcc-owner@gcc.gnu.org Received: (qmail 23133 invoked from network); 4 Oct 2002 01:48:10 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO mail-out2.apple.com) (17.254.0.51) by sources.redhat.com with SMTP; 4 Oct 2002 01:48:10 -0000 Received: from mailgate2.apple.com (A17-129-100-225.apple.com [17.129.100.225]) by mail-out2.apple.com (8.11.3/8.11.3) with ESMTP id g941m9s15860 for ; Thu, 3 Oct 2002 18:48:09 -0700 (PDT) Received: from scv3.apple.com (scv3.apple.com) by mailgate2.apple.com (Content Technologies SMTPRS 4.2.1) with ESMTP id ; Thu, 3 Oct 2002 18:47:54 -0700 Received: from apple.com (vpn-scv-x1-33.apple.com [17.219.193.33]) by scv3.apple.com (8.11.3/8.11.3) with ESMTP id g941lr329750; Thu, 3 Oct 2002 18:47:53 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: <3D9CF302.2000804@apple.com> Date: Thu, 03 Oct 2002 22:32:00 -0000 From: Stan Shebs User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20020826 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Joe Buck CC: Richard Henderson , gcc@gcc.gnu.org Subject: Re: deprecate i960 now? References: <200210040018.g940Iac02570@piper.synopsys.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-SW-Source: 2002-10/txt/msg00210.txt.bz2 Joe Buck wrote: >Stan Shebs writes: > >>[ re: obsoleting the i960] >>It would be somewhat of a departure to move from obsoleting long-dead >>architectures to taking away ones that, in Intel's words (in their >>FAQ) are still shipping in "high volumes". >> > >If we have no maintainer and no i960 processors, and the gdb folks are >taking away resources, we can't maintain it. We can have an alternate >designation in such cases, "orphaned" rather than "deprecated", meaning >it's on hold until volunteers step up to the challenge of keeping it >going. > Weighing the very real confusion of having dead code in CVS (will infrastructure patches have to include i960 changes? would I still have to fix the known i960 problems in libobjc? :-) ) vs the vague fears of bad publicity for dropping old targets, I think I'd rather rely on CVS and delete the code. >Sometimes the threat of losing support smokes a skilled user or two out of >the woodwork who has the incentive to keep the tool he relies on going. > That was the theory of obsoleting non-multi-arch configs in GDB; all it needed was someone to spend a couple days on a mostly mechanical conversion, and even then there was nobody (me included) willing to spend that much time on the i960, which says something... There may be nothing to my concern too - back in Cygnus days, the "available for every embedded target you can think of" was a valuable line in the hard sell to potential GNU customers, but there's been some consolidation in embedded-land and GCC is now more generally accepted too, so I don't know if the breadth claim is still important. Stan