Andrew Haley wrote:
Basile STARYNKEVITCH wrote:
FWIW, I am not taking this question personally (I don't really claim
that I could become any kind of reviewer; I believe in general that
reviewing abilities should be evaluated by others.). I just think the
set of reviewers should significantly grow.
I am not sure to parse correctly this sentence. Sorry, English is a
foreign language to me. Is "reload" some functionality (PCH?) you refer
inside GCC, or is it the task of making reviews on patches submitted on
gcc-patches@ ? I was just thinking about stuff like "Fred Bloggs knows
enough to approve patches submitted on gcc-patches@ to files gcc/ggc*.[ch]"
This is going to sound rude, but if you don't know what reload is
you're not able to talk about gcc maintenance.
Reload is probably in the register allocator, which indeed is in the
backend part I know nothing about (and I don't care much).
Your opinion is not rude, but I still believe one don"t need to
understand all of the GCC internals to talk about the review process. I
even believe that some people (e.g. those working on other big software
like Gnome/GTK, KDE/QT, Mozilla, ...) could have valid opinions &
suggestions on it without even knowing anything about GCC, but only
understanding the review procedures.
I even disagree on your opinion. I believe I might even become in a few
years some kind of gcc/ggc*.[ch] secondary reviewer. I don't want to
become one (being a reviewer is probably more a burden than an honor,
and probably consume a lot of time, and might be often boring.).
However, I am pretty sure that nobody needs to understand register
allocation to review GGC related patches, or Ada or C++ front end
patches, or Fortran front-end patches, or CPP patches, or perhaps even
some gcc/passes.c or gcc/tree-passes.h patches like the plugin related
ones.).
This is precisely my point. It should be perfectly acceptable that some
people be authorized to approve some few patches without understanding
the whole of GCC, and even without knowing all of it.
Now, I understand you or others can disagree with my opinion. You may
think that most reviewers should know most of GCC (I disagree with that).
My point is that GCC could quite soon grow to 5 or 6MLOC, and the set of
people understanding all of them (or simply more than half of them)
will, if it is not yet empty, decrease dramatically.
Perhaps some GCC decision making people (SC?) might even want to really
decrease the size of core GCC. This could be possible with the plugin
feature. As an extreme & silly example, they (or is it we?) could decide
to move out of GCC core and into future GCC plugins all the
optimizations done only at -O3 or only with explicit -f* flags. I don't
really advocate that (again I don't have any informed opinion; I almost
never used -O3 and know few people who do use it!) but it could be possible.
Regards
--
Basile STARYNKEVITCH http://starynkevitch.net/Basile/
email: basile<at>starynkevitch<dot>net mobile: +33 6 8501 2359
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*** opinions {are only mines, sont seulement les miennes} ***
