https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=81084
--- Comment #30 from John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz at physik dot fu-berlin.de> --- (In reply to Jakub Jelinek from comment #29) > The rs6000 backend had since the split around 290 commits that didn't touch > the powerpcspe backend, if we just assume that only 20% of those are > relevant to powerpcspe too (hard to judge exactly because the dead code from > there isn't removed), then that is still significant number of known issues > in the port. It works fine for Debian. gcc-8 is able to build itself on powerpcspe with no apparent issues. I can also run the testsuite if necessary. We currently have turned it off to save build time as we currently have only three powerpcspe build machines. But we will add two more in the near future and then we can also enable running testsuites. > The announcement of the intent to obsolete the port has been posted already > more than a year ago, if you look in the comments in this PR, you'll see > numerous pings, despite which no (significant) action has been taken. Well, not everyone can be on every list, so it's easy to miss such announcements. There are many projects like OpenJDK, binutils, glibc, the kernel and such which want upstream attention, so you have to agree it's a bit difficult to be always everywhere to be able to answer questions. I was just pointed at your deprecation mail on IRC. In any case, Debian is probably the largest downstream user that has such a huge variety of ports. We are building always the latest versions of gcc natively on more than 20 architectures: > https://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=gcc-8&suite=sid Matthias Klose is constantly uploading new versions and we always make sure gcc builds fine on all targets - natively. We also have a gcc-snapshot package that is constantly updated to the latest SVN version and built natively as well: > https://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=gcc-snapshot&suite=sid We have users who are using Debian on these targets, even on m68k because retro computing is very popular around that CPU. So, I think it would be fair if important upstream projects like gcc could send a message to downstream projects like Debian in such cases, to give at least users of certain ports a notice if there are any concerns upstream. > GCC backends need active maintainance, including regular testing, reporting > regressions and fixing those, otherwise they are only significant burden to > other maintainers and not really useful to users. I am aware of that. But the thing is, the backend in question works fine at the moment. I would agree with your stance if we were seeing any serious issues with it. But that's currently not the case, so I don't understand this particular action. Is there anything specific bug that blocks things at the moment that we are missing downstream?
