Mark Mitchell wrote:
I've heard various comments about whether or not it's worth doing a 4.2 release at all. For example:
[...]
So, my feeling is that the best course of action is to set a relatively low threshold for GCC 4.2.0 and target 4.2.0 RC1 soon: say, March 10th. Then, we'll have a 4.2.0 release by (worst case, and allowing for lameness on my part) March 31.Feedback and alternative suggestions are welcome, of course.
The 4.2.0 release is fairly significant to GFortran. In my opinion, it's really the first 4.x release for which we have a mature Fortran compiler -- while 4.1 is a big improvement over 4.0 (which we pretty much officially recommend against using, at this point), it's missing quite a bit of functionality and a lot of bugfixes that only made it into 4.2 and 4.3.
In addition, the GFortran team has put a good bit of work specificially into the 4.2 branch, and in backporting fixes to it after the 4.2/4.3 split. I think it's important to consider that creating the branch is not just a commitment to our userbase; it's a commitment to the volunteers who put time into working on it.
Thus, I would find the option of discarding the current 4.2 tree in favor of an "upgraded" 4.1 tree to be extremely disheartening; not only does it discard the GFortran work done on the 4.2 branch, but it also releases a Fortran compiler that is significantly inferior to what's currently in that branch and what we've been promising. (Backporting the fixes is sufficiently impractical to be out of the question.)
I also think that it would be unfortunate to replace 4.2 with a copy of 4.3. Besides the fact that it discards lots of work, the extra time that it will take to get a release ready means that much more time until the new stuff makes it into a released version, and IMHO we've been telling people "the released versions are way out of date; use a development version" quite long enough.
Thus, from a GFortran perspective, I am very strongly in favor of the proposal to fix the P1s in the current 4.2 branch and ship it.
- Brooks
