On Tue, Dec 6, 2011 at 2:49 PM, Diego Novillo <dnovi...@google.com> wrote: > At the last developer's meeting in London, Joseph and I agreed to work > on an architectural definition for GCC. We now have something that, > while incomplete, should be enough to discuss. > > Our main intent is to define new conventions and guidelines that will > simplify GCC development. The document is organized in three distinct > areas: > > 1- A high-level overview of the problem, as we see it. This describes > the different problematic aspects of GCC development and how we think > they should change. We would like the discussion to start here. > Without consensus on the overall issues, much of the rest becomes > moot. We think that these issues are very important for the long term > viability of GCC. > > 2- A set of proposed development conventions. These are to become > part of the coding guidelines so that new patches are measured against > them. > > 3- Improvement projects. These are largely existing projects that we > have organized under a new wiki page. Most of these projects need > resources to finalize their design, schedule estimates and > implementation. > > You will notice that taken together, these projects represent a > massive amount of work. We will need to prioritize projects and we > are hoping for major institutional contributors to provide resources > to help finish them. Naturally, the relative importance of these > projects will vary greatly across institutions, so we should find > owners for the more popular ones. > > Parts #1 and #2 are to become fixed pages in GCC's home page (perhaps > http://gcc.gnu.org/gccmission.html). Part #3 is intended to be more > dynamic, so we are hosting it on GCC's wiki. > > For the time being, however, it is easier for me to edit the document > online. The document is at > https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1ZfyfkB62EFaR4_g4JKm4--guz3vxm9pciOBziMHTnK4 > > The improvement projects are at > http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/ImprovementProjects. I will link it from the > main wiki index soon. > > Please, start reviewing the main document first. We would like to > reach consensus on the high-level aspects before discussing the > specific projects. > > > Thanks. > > > Joseph and Diego.
Joseph and Diego, Thanks for this thread. I think an improvement could be made in automated downloading of GCC and dependencies (I looked in the wiki and the document and didn't see this, but it is worth mentioning). Any script (and new users as well) must understand which dependencies are allowed for which releases, but those dependencies are only unambiguously codified in the configure scripts, creating a chicken/egg problem - you need to download and configure GCC before you can be assured the configure will succeed. I suggest some kind of backend step that automatically exports dependency information to a public place (web page/xml file). Then a simple script could use it to check and fetch dependencies, tarballs, URLs, even get some simple documentation. Speaking of documentation, the dependency info could be used to augment the release documentation. -- Quentin [Joseph: apologies for the double email]
