Re: Getting the ARC port reviewed and accepted

[Richard Biener <richard.guenther@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Oct 2, 2013 at 3:49 PM, Andrew Haley <aph@redhat.com> wrote:
> On 10/02/2013 01:46 PM, David Edelsohn wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Oct 2, 2013 at 4:31 AM, Andrew Haley<aph@redhat.com>  wrote:
>>>
>>> On 10/02/2013 12:47 AM, David Edelsohn wrote:
>>>>
>>>> It is unfortunate that global reviewers are so busy that they cannot
>>>> review the few, infrequent new port submissions. But I find it very
>>>> distasteful for someone to hyperventilate because other, busy people
>>>> don't do something that appears obvious.
>>>
>>>
>>> I'm sure you do, but I find it far more distasteful to have a willing
>>> volunteer blocked for so long under such circumstances.  This is not
>>> the way that we should be doing things.
>>
>>
>> Productive, helpful suggestions on how to improve the situation are
>> welcome.
>
>
> Clearly, insisting that only one of the few global maintainers can
> review the port is a problem.  Global maintainers don't scale.  There
> is no reason why the maintainer of another port can't review this
> port.  It doesn't necessarily need an global maintainer.
>
> While a technical review of the port would undoubtedly be helpful, it
> does not make any sense to block the ARC port until it receives one:
> this is an unbounded wait.
>
> If there aren't any middle-end changes, the consequence of an ARC port
> that's not good is at worst an ARC port in GCC that is not good.  Even
> if there are middle-end changes, these can be reviewed separately.
>
> The downside of continuing to block this submission for another year
> is obvious, and is, I submit, worse than the downside of accepting a
> port that still needs some work.

The main reason for technical review of a port is to avoid that it uses
deprecated mechanisms and thus blocks removal of them.  Like
accepting a port that uses target macros when a corresponding
target hook exists, or accepting a port that uses reload instead of LRA,
or any other partial transition thing we had this matrix for somewhere
somewhen.

Richard.

> Andrew.