On Wed, 1 Jun 2011, Basile Starynkevitch wrote: > In my view, you are talking of the mythical > ModularGCC project,
While there is a serious problem with a lack of reviewers reviewing modularization patches (such as Joern's patch to avoid target.h including tm.h, now in its fourth ping <http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2011-06/msg00307.html>), it's anything but mythical. > which should be a mega-patch, Nonsense. It should be hundreds, maybe thousands of separate incremental patches. While, for example, there shouldn't be an exactly one-to-one conversion of the 716 remaining target macros into hooks, 716 patches would be a much more appropriate conversion than one mega-patch. > and I never saw it on > gcc-patches@ so far. Then you can't have been paying attention to gcc-patches over the past decade. There have been thousands of patches cleaning up some aspect of compiler internals rather than directly changing the compiler's behavior, and many of those have been improving modularity. If you want modularization, insulting all the people who have been working on it by calling their work mythical is not the way to go about it, and nor is complaining about the lack of modularization. Instead, demonstrate the utility of plugins by writing plugins to do such things as understanding inter-header dependencies and working out what source files actually depend on what headers, or automatically assisted conversion of target macros to hooks. (I'm not convinced plugins are the best tool for this, but I'm sure appropriate tools would help. So if you wish to be an effective advocate for plugins, stop talking about them in isolation and produce real self-contained modularization patches to GCC that can be reviewed on their own merits - then explain how the use of plugins was what allowed you to produce a hundred 1000-line patches in a day, and to revise the whole hundred-patch series quickly in response to review comments. Once you have concrete plugins of real use in improving GCC, the patches to GCC to allow those plugins to be used will be of a lot more interest.) -- Joseph S. Myers jos...@codesourcery.com
