Re: Branching for GCC 3.0

[Franz Sirl <Franz.Sirl-kernel@lauterbach.com>]

At 17:16 2001-01-08, Robert Lipe wrote:
>Jeffrey A Law wrote:
> >   In message < 20010107145939R.mitchell@codesourcery.com >you write:
> >   > It's the usual volunteer-driven thing; there's been eons of time to
> >   > get 64-bit Ultrasparc into GCC, and if it hasn't happenned yet, that
> >   > can only indicate that it is either hard, or that nobody has been
> >   > terribly motivated.
> > That is the core of the problem.  The subreg patch is big and touches
> > just about every file that deals with RTL if I understand correctly.
>
>Additionally, in fairness to Mark's sanity, the GCC3 criteria were
>published for comment some time ago.  Neither the words "ultra" or
>"v9" appear in it.  At the last moment, suggesting the inclusion of
>additional work that hasn't seen as much testing isn't likely to be well
>received.

Well, actually I would think the subreg-byte-branch got more real world 
testing on alpha/x86/sparc than the current mainline, cause it's part of 
the RedHat7 gcc-2.96 AFAIK.
Also if the merge with the mainline is postponed after 3.0 is branched off, 
that will make backporting fixes to the gcc-3_0-branch much more difficult.

So I believe we should at least seriously think about a possible inclusion 
into 3.0.

What I would like to see is something like:

  - bring the subreg-byte-branch uptodate with the mainline
  - encourage developers to commit all changes to both mainline and branch 
for a few days
  - analyze any differences in the testresults

This should give us a better picture if merging the subreg-byte-branch 
makes sense for 3.0.

Franz.