Policy for removing target support

[Rainer Orth]

Hi Jan,

>> true, but I still wonder what's the point between 10 and 14 years after
>> the fact?  I can fully understand conservatism in this respect, as is
>> evident by me supporting old OS versions in GCC for quite some time, but
>> at some point you have to make a cut.  I still maintain that untested
>> code is useless if not harmful by suggesting support that doesn't
>> actually work.
>
> First, despite the growing testsuite, lots and lots of code are untested

... which is no reason to have more if it can be avoided ;-)

> Then I'm still feeling like you're mixing the "building on" and "building
> for" aspects. IOW I still don't understand what parts of untested code
> you'd like to remove as a result on "building on" no longer being possible.
> Or else why you brought up the "building on" aspect in the first place.

But what's the point of even building cross-binutils if the target
itself is no longer used and hasn't been for a long time?

> As to the "building for", my earlier question still didn't get a clear
> answer (or maybe what seemed clear to you didn't end up clear for me): As
> indicated, I'm having trouble matching the version numbers (e.g. 10) with
> what we have in the two configure scripts in question. Which in turn
> makes it impossible for me to understand what parts you think can be
> dropped there.

Right now, I'd be dropping primarily the bfd/config.bfd and
ld/configure.tgt snippets pertaining to pre-Solaris 10 versions.  That's
not too much, but would could considerably simplify the script by not
littering them with unused parts.  There may be more, but at least it's
a start.  It's equivalent to previous such efforts in both GCC and GDB:
once the configure support is gone, you no longer need to worry about
those old versions (which haven't been considered anyway, but nobody can
tell if they still work since they are untested) and remove code
specific to them if you come across it.

As I said, I very well understand the point about being conservative,
but there should be a limit and I try to understand what that is.

	Rainer

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Rainer Orth, Center for Biotechnology, Bielefeld University