Re: Some more patches for GCC on NetBSD/VAX coming soon...

[Paul Koning <paulkoning%comcast.net@localhost>]

> On Apr 1, 2016, at 4:20 PM, Jake Hamby <jehamby420%me.com@localhost> wrote:
> 
>> On Mar 30, 2016, at 01:09, David Brownlee <abs%netbsd.org@localhost> wrote:
>> 
>> On 30 March 2016 at 07:21, Jake Hamby <jehamby420%me.com@localhost> wrote:
>>> I'm looking at a few remaining issues in the recent update in NetBSD-current to GCC 5.3, which overall appears to be an improvement over 4.8.5. I dropped GCC-patches from the CC list because I don't think 98% of the subscribers to that list care about VAX, while I know that 100% of the subscribers to this one do. ;-)
>> 
>> That sounds like a very safe assumption :-p
> 
> Yes, I replied to an engineer from Red Hat on that list to apologize for even bothering the list with something in so rough a state for an architecture that 99% of them aren't interested in. To be honest, if I were working on supporting GCC for my day job (despite my great interest in toolchains, I haven't yet worked on a compiler "professionally"), I would probably lean towards voting to deprecate the VAX backend since apparently the previous maintainer is no longer working on it and it obviously has some bugs that still need to be fixed.

If that's true, then it suggests another maintainer should step up.  Just because it's old doesn't mean GCC will automatically drop it; the question is whether there is a maintainer.

That's not necessarily a hard job.  It's more a matter of how much time you're interested in investing in fixing things.  Some years ago I stepped up as pdp11 maintainer for GCC to keep that port alive, and it hasn't been a demanding task.  Not that I've done a whole lot, unfortunately; but I did fix some issues and from time to time I run the test suite for the pdp11 port to see that things are at least not getting worse.

	paul