Mark Mitchell wrote:
I am aware of three remaining projects which are or might be appropriate
for Stage 1:
[...]
In the interests of moving forwards, I therefore plan to close this
exceptionally long Stage 1 as of next Friday, June 15th. The projects
named above may be merged, even though we will be in Stage 2 -- but no
other functionality of Stage 1 scope may be included after this point.
An additional project, which is not on your list and perhaps should be:
Several members of the GFortran team (primarily Chris Rickett and Steve
Kargl) have been working on a project to add the BIND(C) functionality
from the Fortran 2003 standard. This provides for a standard means of
linking Fortran code with code that uses standard C linkage conventions,
as well as adding some other useful features.
This work has been done on the "fortran-experiments" branch; my
impression is that it is essentially ready to go into the review
process, though there may be some small final bits of debugging
remaining to be done. I've cc'ed this to the fortran@ list for comment
from the people working on it.
I don't believe this project has been documented very well (if at all)
on the standard Wiki page for Stage-1 projects, but I haven't looked at
it in a while. I am also not entirely certain whether this qualifies as
a Stage 1 or a Stage 2 project, since it produces fairly pervasive
changes but only within the Fortran front end (and libgfortran library);
however, the assumption on the Fortran list has been that it ought be
merged during the Stage 1 period.
In any case, I very strongly believe that this should be included in
4.3, and would hope that if the review process takes a couple of weeks
that it can still be merged in.
I am also considering a "lockdown" period beginning June 15th during
which we would go into a regressions-only mode (other than possible
merges of the functionality above) in order to begin eliminating some of
the problems that have come in with the exciting new infrastructure.
Any comments on that course of action?
IMO, for the Fortran front end, "regressions-only" is an inappropriate
criterion for this sort of mode, given that the front end does not have
a long history for the wrong-code and ICE-on-valid bugs to be
regressions against.
Thus, at least for the Fortran front end, I think that a "wrong-code,
ICE, and regressions" limit is much more appropriate, with an
understanding that the spirit of the thing is to avoid large risky
patches even if they meet the letter of that criterion.
However, with that caveat (and with the presumption that the BIND(C)
projects gets merged in), from a Fortran perspective I would agree that
this is a good idea; the bug numbers have been creeping upwards of late,
and could use a coordinated effort at reductions.
- Brooks
