> On Wed, 2 Mar 2005, Waldek Hebisch wrote:
>
> > > If GPC developers are interested in having GPC integrated in GCC 4.1 and
> > > are willing to have it play by the same rules as the rest of GCC - note
> > > that the Ada maintainers made substantial changes to how they contributed
> > > patches to GCC in order to follow usual GCC practice more closely - then
> > > of course coordination would be desirable.
> >
> > I would like to see GPC integrated in GCC. However, I feel that playing
> > by the GCC rules I could do substantially less work for GPC that I am
> > doing now. GCC rules pay off when there is critical mass of developers.
> > My ipression was that GPC do not have that critical mass -- so it was
> > better to keep GPC outside of GCC. Jim contibution can change that.
>
> Which rules are the problem?
>
Keeping the whole development in lockstep and stages.
1) With current GPC I can work out a new feature and test it using old
backend. Such feature relatively quickly can go out in a development
snapshot which is usable by ordinary users (the development snapshot
uses old, tested backend which shields users form most bugs outside
the front end). At the same time I can work on adapting GPC to newer
backend. All that when _I_ have time.
Staged development introduces deadlines and delays, which are very
disruptive for me (it seems that other peope can handle schedules
much better than I can). I can easily miss stage-1 or even
stage-1 and stage-2 window...
2) GPC developers are supposed to work the mainline. While many changes
are applied automatically to the whole mainline, some will require
manual intervention. While such intervention is usually trivial,
it is still significant distraction from other work (adjusting GPC
to follow mainline I have found that I spent much less time
doing the work in a single batch, then trying to follow smaller
changes).
3) AFAIU dropping support for multiple backends is considered as a
pre-condition to inclusion of GPC into GCC. GPC release wold be
part of GCC release. People trying GPC snapshots would automatically
get backend snapshot. I am affraid that for Pascal that means
6-8 months extra delay between including a feature in GPC and first
bug reports (and consequently more effort for bug fixing).
4) I feel bad not fixing bugs in release version. But after merges
is stage 1 mainline is significanly changed. More important, large
parts which are logically the same are still subject to a lot of
trivial changes. So fixing bugs in release version means double
work.
--
Waldek Hebisch
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
