On Sat, 3 Oct 2015, David Edelsohn wrote: > It's poor form to fix a bug only on x86 that is common to all targets > and leave the problem "as an exercise for the reader" for all other > targets -- essentially banishing the other targets to second-class > status with respect to conformance -- especially when the change is > mostly mechanical. I don't expect developers to specifically enable > and exploit every new feature on every architecture, but had expected > bug fixes to be distributed to all targets. "It's just not cricket."
I have no disagreement with that principle. My disagreement is about how this particular patch fits in with such principles, where there is a subjective judgement involved about how separate issues with different targets' code are, and about how much fixing an issue for a target involves expertise in that architecture and back end versus expertise in the issue being fixed, and about the merits of checking in testcases early so it's as easy as possible to see whether a given target is actually affected. If in such a case the judgement is that something can be more efficiently fixed with target expertise, it is of course important to be thorough about handling over the expertise in the fix (for example, in this case, explaining how to tell when TARGET_EXPR needs to be used). Perhaps GCC should have an equivalent of glibc's <https://sourceware.org/glibc/wiki/PortStatus> to list cases where it was judged for a particular change that updates could most effectively be made by target maintainers. -- Joseph S. Myers jos...@codesourcery.com
