GCC var-tracking-assignments: testing and bug reports appreciated

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Sep 10, 2009, Josh Boyer <jwboyer at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 09, 2009 at 06:35:09AM -0400, Josh Boyer wrote:
>> On Tue, Sep 08, 2009 at 10:46:26PM -0300, Alexandre Oliva wrote:
>>> Jakub built gcc-4.4.1-10 earlier today, with a new feature that
>>> generates much better debug information in optimized programs.
>>> 
>>> The feature has been under development for a couple of years, and it's
>>> recently been accepted into GCC, for GCC 4.5.  We've backported it for
>>> Fedora 12.
>> 
>> Why are you backporting something like this from a non-released compiler
>> into F12 _after_ Alpha and particularly _after_ the mass rebuild?

> No response?  None?

It helps to Cc: me.  There are hundreds of mailing lists I'm in that I
don't open every day ;_)

As Jakub said, this was planned to go in before.  The merge into Fedora
was delayed because there was a possibility of upstream rejection, based
on opinions voiced some 1 or 2 years ago, when this work was still in
early planning and development stages.

Indeed, formal acceptance took much longer than anticipated, which is
why this hit Fedora rawhide so late in the game.

I can surely understand the feeling that, as a feature, it should have
respected the feature freeze deadlines.  But this feature also happens
to be a major bug fix, for debug information in optimized programs way
too often used to be incorrect and incomplete, to the point of being
pretty much a show-stopper for systemtap and other monitoring,
inspection and debugging tools that rely on debug information.

As such, I apologize for the delays in getting buy-in from upstream and
completing the work needed to get it in, and ask you to please tolerate
the delays and the changes, let it into Fedora 12, and enjoy the
better-quality debug information while debugging problems in time for
Fedora 12 ;-)

Thanks,

-- 
Alexandre Oliva, freedom fighter    http://FSFLA.org/~lxoliva/
You must be the change you wish to see in the world. -- Gandhi
Be Free! -- http://FSFLA.org/   FSF Latin America board member
Free Software Evangelist      Red Hat Brazil Compiler Engineer