On Sun, 6 Mar 2005, Frank Heckenbach wrote: > So to make it short, for my own productive work I'm not going to use > gpc with a backend that hasn't been tested with gpc for at least > several months. Therefore, I'm not going to do my own frontend work > on such a version, as I want to be able to try it immediately. So if > you think dropping older backends is the only way to support 4.x, a > fork would be inevitable. But I'm not convinced this is really > necessary.
Testing for 4.x and making stable with 4.x is the sort of thing naturally done on a branch. This is what was done in GCC CVS on the tree-ssa branch: support for the old way of doing things was replaced with support for the new, while changes made in mainline were regularly merged to the tree-ssa branch. As I understand it, James Morrison has proposed to do more or less that, though in his own repository since GPC lacks a public repository: port to the 4.x back end and merge in changes made to mainline GPC until there is a stable 4.x-based front end aligned with the mainline GPC front end. > So IMHO the best thing for a smooth transition would be to add 4.x > support as far as we can, with conditionals, so everyone can test it > and we can drop earlier backend as soon as (safely) possible. If you can make such conditionals work, then fine. I'm just doubtful of how clean the result will be given the extent of the changes to the front-end interface with tree-ssa, and as soon as it goes in GCC CVS it's inevitable changes tested only with GCC CVS will happen to break support for some previous back end. -- Joseph S. Myers http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~jsm28/gcc/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal mail) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (CodeSourcery mail) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Bugzilla assignments and CCs)
