On Jan 12, 2007, at 4:35 AM, Nathan Sidwell wrote:
The major chunk of this reworking has been blocked from going into mainline because GCC was in stages 2 & 3 for much of this year.
Yeah, spending large amounts of time in stage2 and 3 does have disadvantages. I'd rather have people that have regressions spend a year at a time in stage2-3... :-( Maybe we should have trunk be stage1, and then snap over to a stage2 branch when the stage1 compiler is ready to begin stage2, and likewise, when the stage2 compiler is ready to go to stage3, it then snaps to the release branch. This gives a place for the preintegration of stage1 level work when ever that work is ready, without having to delay it for months at a time.
Another possibility is to use the next unreleased major release branch as stage 2, and the current major release branch as essentially stage3, with trunk remaining stage1.
Then the work doesn't need to wait for the right stage, rather, the work is Oked for the stage it is suitable for.
I've not spent much time thinking about this, this is just off the cuff, but, I thought I would post it as 9 months in stage2-3 seems like a long time to me.