Re: [Gomp-discuss] CVS organization

[Diego Novillo]

On Tue, 2004-04-06 at 10:20, Biagio Lucini wrote:

> The problem is that we don't know exactly what to do and how to do it. We can 
> have short term objectives that might contrast with those of gcc (that we 
> want to embrace in the long term anyway). For instance, suppose we decide to 
> target just Linux for a start, because this will help us to understand how 
> things work; the gcc will obviously react badly, and our plans can be 
> affected...
> 
Not at all.  While you are inside a branch you are free to do exactly
what you want.  Nobody will object if your short-term objective is to
make it work only on x86-linux or if you disable all languages but C.
All the branches start with very experimental stuff that mutates rapidly
as the branch matures.

> If you like, think of this as a play-ground branch. We are here to learn what 
> to do, when we have a good implementation we will contribute it to the rest 
> of the gcc community. I suppose that gfortran developed this way.
> 
No, I think that's the wrong approach.  Mature inside the branch.  
That's precisely what branches are there for.  See what happened to
tree-ssa.  It started working on C syntax trees, then Sebastian Pop
noticed that working on the SIMPLE IL would be better, then Jason
Merrill proposed creating another language-independent layer to abstract
out the FE completely, then Jeff Law, Andrew Macleod and Richard
Henderson convinced me that the SSA representation should be changed to
a more intuitive representation, then...  well, you get the picture.

Expose the maturing process and the community will thank you for it. 
Nobody in the GCC community knows how to implement OpenMP on GCC.  If
you come one day with the whole thing implemented without no visible
process, you will likely have a hard time selling it to the community.


Diego.