Hi all,
As you may or may not know, upstream GCC has now entered 'stage 3' of it's development cycle. This will last until spring.
This means that they are only accepting bug fixes and documentation improvements. New features and any performance improvements must wait until GCC 4.6 branches, prior to release, and GCC 4.7 development opens.
During this process, our usual preferred work flow (upstream first) will not work, so we'll have to do something else.
Here's my proposal:
* Create a new Launchpad branch for GCC 4.6.
* Synchronize this branch with upstream regularly * once per week, perhaps.
* Try to get upstream approval for all new patches in the usual way * on the understanding that they won't be applied until stage 1 * bug fixes are unaffected and may commit as usual.
* Commit all pending patches to our own 4.6 branch * and backport them to our 4.5, branch, of course.
* Usual "no test regressions" policy applies to our own patches * but beware regressions from merges from upstream. * we may want to track the clean 4.6 test results for comparison
This is little different to what we do with the 4.5 release branch now.
Thoughts?
Andrew