libgcj maintenance for 4.0.x branch

Fri Apr 15 18:36:00 GMT 2005

Michael Koch has volunteered to maintain the GCC 4.0.x branch for
libgcj. This basically involves moving approved patches from HEAD back
to the branch.
It would be good to set up some kind of policy for what patches should
be acceptable. Perhaps something like this already exists.
My suggestion is simply to make the golden rule:
"Programs built against libgcj 4.0.a should link correctly against
libgcj 4.0.b where a<b."
So this means chunks of new library code should be OK, even if the
existence of that new library code should cause different behaviour in a
program built against an older version of libgcj. This gives us lots of
flexibility and should be relatively easy to guarantee - a nice trade-
off between stability and the desire for some continuous innovation on
the FC4 platform (which is using GCC 4.0.x as the system compiler).
I've discussed this with tromey and he agrees with this plan.
Any comments?
AG