Eric Botcazou writes: > > Tom, I presume there was a very good reason for installing such a > potentially > destabilizing patch a few days before the prerelease?
In defence of my fellow maintainer: There was. We are now, for the first time ever, in a position where we can run a large number of big Java applications using entirely free software. > What amount of testing did it undergo before being backported? A good deal. It was in mainline for some time before, after some contemplation, we decided that it was so important that it should go into 4.0. Without this patch many important applications will not work correctly. I appreciate that it's important that gcc runs on many platforms and that Solaris has been an important platform for gcc. But it's also important that we can run a large number of real world applications on gcj on free platforms. > Still, we are a bit stuck on SPARC/Solaris because there is not > much interest for that platform among the Java hackers (for > SPARC/Linux either, I think). AFAIK the only Java patches aimed at > fixing problems there have been posted or initiated by me. So I > suspect nobody will step up to investigate what broke. > > I understand that Java on SPARC is not a priority, but I think in > such extreme cases Java hackers should coordinate with the platform > maintainers that try to keep the Java compiler healthy on their > architecture, despite the huge tax of CPU cycles this entails. We're in a diffcult position here, because SPARC has few maintainers, and Java has few maintainers. However, if you can let me have a logon I can have a look. Andrew.
