Re: heads up: GDB 7.7 official release Wed Jan 29th (tomorrow)

["Ulrich Weigand" <uweigand@de.ibm.com>]

Mark Kettenis wrote:
> > From: Joel Brobecker <brobecker@adacore.com>
> > 
> > OK, I've had a chance to review the patches, and I am definitely
> > hesitating. I agree that they can only affect PowerPC. If you feel
> > very confident about the patches and want to take responsibility,
> > I will go with your call. Advice from the other GMs would also be
> > useful.
> > 
> > My preference goes towards getting this code in the master branch
> > first, release 7.7 without it, and then re-evaluate. If proven after
> > an observation period to be stable in master, we can elect to backport
> > the code to 7.7 in time for 7.7.1. But if people prefer, we can also
> > accelerate the schedule for 7.8.
> 
> I'd say that rushing changes like this in just before release is just
> bad engineering practice in general.  And in this case I have a hard
> time convincing myself that this will not break existing big-endian
> PowerPC targets.  This is the sort of stuff that you want to get in
> early in a release cycle.  I also think we shouldn't do these
> feature-driven release adjustments.  There's just to many external
> variables to take them into account.
> 
> So I'd say this should go onto master after 7.7 has been released, and
> 7.8 should be released according to the normal schedule.  If meanwhile
> IBM or any of the Linux distros wants to ship a 64-bit wrong-endian
> PowerPC toolchain they can just take 7.7 and apply the patches.

Oh, I'm not so much concerned about the distros -- we'll get those sorted
out (and they may need backports to even earlier releases anyway).  It
just seems it would have been nice for users of the FSF releases to have
an official GDB release that works on this new platform in a similar time
frame as the other components of the toolchain become available.

In any case, if the general sentiment is that we shouldn't do this as a
last-minute change at this stage, I can certainly understand and accept that.

Thanks,
Ulrich

-- 
  Dr. Ulrich Weigand
  GNU/Linux compilers and toolchain
  Ulrich.Weigand@de.ibm.com