On Wed, Dec 7, 2011 at 2:32 PM, Richard Earnshaw <rearn...@arm.com> wrote: > On 07/12/11 13:02, Richard Guenther wrote: >> On Wed, Dec 7, 2011 at 1:34 PM, Jakub Jelinek <ja...@redhat.com> wrote: >>> On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 05:59:53PM -0800, Doug Kwan wrote: >>>> This is a backport for two upstream patches into our 4.6 branch. >>>> I submitted the first patch by Julian a while ago for backport but >>>> Richard Earnshaw pointed out a problem with the first patch. The second >>>> patch from Joey fixes that problem. This was tested on x86 and ARM. >>> >>> Why hasn't this been proposed for upstream 4.6 instead? >>> See PR51442. >> >> It's indeed annoying to see arm related backports only going to >> vendor branches, not the last officially maintained GCC release >> branch (4.6). I keep getting local requests to include random >> patches to our 4.6 build to make "arm work at all". It seriously >> seems like having arm-linux-gnueabi as a primary target is a lie to our >> users. >> >> Arm maintainers - please consider maintaining at least the current >> release series and shift focus away from your vendor branches. >> > > So this, to some extent seems to conflict with your rules for only fixing > regressions. This code has always been broken in one way or another, > so technically this doesn't qualify for the 4.6 branch. > > I think we need clearer rules (on the web site, not in a mailing list post) > that describes which patches are considered acceptable on the branch and > which are not.
We generally accept wrong-code fixes (or rejects-valid) that are low-risk. Target maintainers have complete freedom for their targets provided a fix is really target-only (we even accept new ports or new ISAs on branches, well - in theory at least). If a maintainer thinks backporting a fix is important he can always defer to a release manager for a final decision. What we generally do not want is new middle-end functionality. And we generally raise the barrier for "low-risk" the more mature a branch is. As a general rule, if you'd point users to "use the arm-embedded branch" for bugreports you get, then you are doing sth wrong. If you say, "use the arm-embedded branch" to get smaller/faster code - well, that's ok. Pointing people to the latest official release series (in this case 4.6.x) is also ok, we're keeping too many branches active IMNSHO. Richard. > R. >