Re: Bountysource campaign for gcc-vax

["Maciej W. Rozycki" <macro%linux-mips.org@localhost>]

On Wed, 9 Dec 2020, David Brownlee wrote:

> Just an idle question - at some point in the future might you be
> interested in another bounty in a similar area? :-p :-p :-p

 Well, it's not the bounty, it's the satisfaction!  Anyway, do you have 
anything specific in mind?

 I'm asking among others because in this case all the pieces of the jigsaw 
matched as if miraculously:

* after a long struggle I regained Internet access in my lab just before 
  the pandemic spread across Europe,

* I have literally just expanded the lab with a brand new second 
  PDU/console server I could use to finally properly wire Lizzie, the 
  VAXstation which ran the testsuite,

* speaking of which, thanks to Ragge I had it in the first place, and then 
  I had some spare DRAM modules lying around, something not to be taken 
  for granted at all, I could use to max it out,

* then also literally just I have collected all the needed components 
  (which for some reason turned out a bit of a challenge of its own), 
  assembled and installed Angie, a POWER9 server which ran compilations 
  and drove the testsuite,

* and finally (though there's likely something else I forgot about) I have 
  lost my job at the right time so that I was able to commit to this task 
  full-time and submit it in time for inclusion with GCC 11.

All in this difficult time.  Things may not match so well in the future 
(though I'd rather take the pandemic out of the picture, and perhaps the 
loss of the job too), and then I need to find myself a new dayjob first 
anyway (at which point I won't have as much time for side project, to say 
nothing of any conflict of interest).

 I have literally just now committed a couple of extra patches to fix the 
backend-induced ICEs I have previously observed in regression-testing, but 
not considered show-stoppers for the main change, as well as a few small 
issues I have noticed in the course.

 Otherwise I need to move on to other stuff (the damn DEFPA issue with 
Angie), but may yet come back if that goes well and I can find some time 
over the festive season (however festive or not it is going to be this 
year).  I'll yet see if I can find some time to properly submit that 
outstanding mount_nfs(8) patch I posted here a while ago, and then there 
was that discussion about mopd(8) too.  But not right away.

 In any case I'm glad I could be of help on this occasion.

  Maciej