Please see below ...

Joe.

-----Original Message----- From: Frank Heckenbach [SMTP:frank@g-n-u.de] Sent: Wednesday, December 11, 2002 3:47 PM To: gpc@gnu.de Subject: Re: New alpha

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Of course, if you really want to, you can "bite the bullet" and try integration right now. But I'm quite sure it will be much more work in total than is doing it in the proper order, and it will be technically dubious solutions (both from the GCC and the GPC viewpoint, in different areas).

OTOH, I don't see any big advantage in hurrying it. It may be easier for distribution makers (so I see your POV, Matthias), but then again, I suppose you have your build scripts in place for the current situation, and changing them to a cleaner (in this regard) style now or later doesn't make a big difference. I don't know about the "simtel distribution" Chuck mentioned -- it's no problem today to make distributions in any form (in source, if wanted, including the GCC sources, already patched possibly; sure, the archive would be a little bigger, some 15 MB instead of 2 MB, but from my impression, most Internet users won't even notice the diffrence today ;-).

Actually I wonder where this "panic" about gcc integration comes from. Since some time, I keep hearing these requests every other week. GPC has been developed for years without such an integration, and I doubt it would have been essentially better if it was integrated -- maybe even worse; currently, when there are severe backend problems (such as the `goto' bug in 2.95 on Solaris/Sparc), there is the recourse to try another GCC version; if it was integrated and tied to one GCC version, we'd depend on that version

[Joe da Silva]

The advantage of integration is that it will give GPC vastly more exposure to potential users and give them the confidence to try it. For the same reason, this must not be done until it is really ready, otherwise it will just give rise to lots of queries and bug reports, which will slow down further progress. Just MHO.

...

Finally, if all that doesn't convince you, I'll put it in a more selfish way. The main reason why I do GPC development is that I also use GPC myself, and it's both useful and interesting to improve the tools I'm using. GCC integration doesn't provide any direct advantage to my work using GPC, so I don't feel like putting any unnecessary work in it (which would be caused by hurrying it).

So, everyone who wants to actually help the GCC integration, just pick your job from the list above (or another one I may have missed). So far only Waldek (with the "port" for gcc-3) and Eike (with the manual license change to FDL, which was another requirement) have done so (and I have done some things WRT the Makefiles and in the code which I found also useful independently of the GCC integration ;-).

Frank

-- Frank Heckenbach, frank@g-n-u.de, http://fjf.gnu.de/, 7977168E GPC To-Do list, latest features, fixed bugs: http://www.gnu-pascal.de/todo.html GPC download signing key: 51FF C1F0 1A77 C6C2 4482 4DDC 117A 9773 7F88 1707