Gabriel Dos Reis wrote: > On Fri, 26 Oct 2007, skaller wrote: > > | I should point out retaining 'old' features can create a > | significant maintenance burden for gcc developers, > > In this specific case, what are they?
The maintenance burden argument always used to remove stuff. I've used it myself plenty of times. Sometimes, it really is too painful. But, sometimes -- and, again, I consider myself guilty -- we've ripped things out under the banner of tidiness and maintenance that imposed a lot of pain on users. This isn't something that one can argue in the abstract. Obviously, there are competing interests. We have to balance our pain as developers against the pain of our users. But, we should be setting the bar high for ourselves because there are many, many users with lots and lots of existing code. Things like "I went through the packages in <some distro> and they all build" isn't a very good measure; those packages are probably reasonably actively maintained. It's the millions upon millions of lines of existing code in truly big applications out there that's a problem. -- Mark Mitchell CodeSourcery [EMAIL PROTECTED] (650) 331-3385 x713
