Hello, Jeff! Hello, all!

(I am citing everything, so the GPC list members know what we are talking about without browsing the HTML page.)

On Wed, 17 Jun 1998 22:46:37 -0600, Jeffrey A Law (law@cygnus.com) wrote in http://www.cygnus.com/ml/egcs/1998-Jun/0628.html:

                              egcs-1.1

The egcs project is rapidly approaching its second major release (egcs-1.1).

This page is meant to provide information about the current schedule for egcs-1.1, the testing/release criteria for egcs-1.1, new features to be found in egcs-1.1, etc.

Maybe this schedule is also reasonable for the next mejor release of GPC (gpc-2.1). I don't know how realistic this is, but the list of bug reports for the latest alpha release was much shorter than for previous ones.

It is probably not reasonable to try to integrate the BP compatibility package and other independent contributions (such as GRX) into the GPC distribution by this date, so let's keep them independent.

The tenative schedule for the egcs-1.1 release is: * July 3, 1998. Feature freeze date. All new features, optimizations, etc need to be submitted by this date. It is very likely we will not be able to integrate all the submissions, but we want to have all of them available for evaluation by this date. It is also possible some patches which have been submitted and are accepted for egcs-1.1 will not have been installed by this date due to EOQ committments for many of the Cygnus volunteers. After July 3, 1998, only bugfix submissions will be considered for the egcs-1.1 release. By July 3, 1998, we also want to have a testing plan and release criteria in place.

For GPC this means that all scheduled features (e.g. some filled BP holes) have to be in place by that date. This merely concerns my own work.

I will try to compose a new :-) beta (-: GPC snapshot by this weekend.

 * July 11, 1998. Branch Creation & Testing.
   We will create the egcs-1.1 branch on this date and snapshots will
   occur from the egcs-1.1 branch instead of the mainline sources.
   By this date we'd like to have all the new features,
   optimizations, etc slated for the egcs-1.1 release installed in
   the source tree.
   We also expect wide scale, focused testing to start on July 11th.

It would be desirable to release updated versions of BPcompat etc. together with gpc-2.1 (while in a separate package). In order to make this possible, gpc-980711 must be about the final version of gpc-2.1.

 * July 31, 1998. Critial Bug Freeze Date.
   If at all possible we would like to see the release sources freeze
   except for critical bug fixes by July 31st. This may be overly
   optimistic, but it's important to have a goal to shoot for.

Besides the actual work on GPC, this means that all administrative tasks (copyright assignments etc.) must be finished before August.

Those of you who are considering to contribute to the GPC compiler itself should contact me NOW so we have a chance to get these jobs done in time. (It involves papers that have to fly over the Atlantic!)

I would like to release as soon as possible in early August.

Note that we have the ability to install changes into the mainline sources during this process. However, I personally will be focusing more and more on egcs-1.1 specific issues.

It is highly likely we will have some minor releases based on egcs-1.1; we will cross that bridge when the time comes.

For GPC, we are planning to split the development into a "stable" line (gpc-2.1.x) and an "experimental" one (gpc-1998mmdd) in order to avoid long delays between the releases (about sqrt(3) years in this case)-: to happen again.

I also want to do a post-release review of the proposed schedule vs the actual schedule used for egcs-1.1 so that we can improve the process in the future.

This message (and future updates) is available on http://www.cygnus.com/egcs/egcs-1.1.html

Greetings,

Peter