Re: Mis-handled ColdFire submission?

[Brooks Moses]

Mike Stump wrote:
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.
[...]
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.

One contrary argument, I suppose, is the hypothesis that if there is 
always a stage-1 branch open, nobody will want to work on fixing the 
bugs rather than implementing new features.

To some extent, the gfortran part of things could be considered a bit of 
an experiment about this -- your suggestion is not too far off of how 
gfortran was being developed, up until about the time 4.2 went into stage 3.

My personal viewpoint isn't an especially good view of that data, since 
I haven't been working on the project that long, but in my limited 
experience it doesn't seem that working on stage-1 type things is being 
a remarkable limit on the amount of effort people put into fixing bugs, 
and the data that Steve Kargl posted as a year-end summary indicates at 
a rough glance that most of the people active on gfortran were active in 
fixing bugs.

However, one thing I have definitely noticed is that keeping track of a 
number of active branches takes a fair bit of effort.  Currently, most 
applicable patches get backported to 4.2, but I'm sure a number get 
overlooked (especially if they're not directly tracked in a PR), but 4.1 
is at this stage pretty much stagnant.

I'm not sure how this would translate to GCC, which has lots more people 
and is considerably more mature, but my guess is that it would take a 
significant bit of additional effort to keep all the bug-fixes 
distributed to all the relevant branches, and I'm not sure how much 
people would put in that extra effort.

- Brooks