Re: GCC withdraw

John Baldwin wrote this message on Fri, Aug 30, 2013 at 10:41 -0400:
> So I think the crux of the issue might be this:
> 
> I have no doubt that this has been discussed extensively on toolchain_at_ and in
> toolchain-specific devsummit sessions.  The proposal to disable GCC by default
> does not appear to have been discussed in a wider audience from what I can
> tell.  (I can't find any relevant threads on arch_at_ or current_at_ prior to this
> one.)  While this is a toolchain-specific decision, it is a very broad
> decision.  Also, we aren't here because of a new thread started intentionally
> to say "Hey, we as the toolchain folks think we should disable GCC by default
> on 10 for x86".  Instead, we started off in a thread about adding AES
> instructions to our binutils and out of left field there is an e-mail of
> "Oh, don't bother cause I'm disabling GCC next week" (paraphrase).  Can you
> appreciate at all that this is a total surprise to people who aren't
> subscribed to toolchain_at_ and haven't been to a toolchain session at a 
> devsummit and that this looks like a drive-by change?

Why didn't this come up when John added XSAVE (a year ago) or Pedro
Giffuni added amdfam10 support (3 months ago)?

Plus, I've sent other patches earlier this year to -toolchain and made
clear why I was adding them...  Had I known that the policy was gcc was
dead for HEAD (which btw, I was told multiple times that we were keeping
gcc for 10 for i386/amd64), I would have just committed my kernel changes
by now, but didn't want to break a (what I thought was) supported
configuration...

We need to communicate better on issues like these, since this isn't the
first time one group of people made a decision w/o telling the rest
of the community...  For major items like this, we need to make sure
the road map is published, either on www.freebsd.org or on the wiki and
gets kept up to date...

For example, the release schedule for 10 wasn't posted till over a week
after the code slush was announced (which caught people, like myself, by
surprise)...  That's kinda the wrong order to do it in, the schedule
should be posted well in advance so people know what to expect...

-- 
  John-Mark Gurney				Voice: +1 415 225 5579

     "All that I will do, has been done, All that I have, has not."