Can you please give more details on the Bug-Fixes in your release descriptions?
Can you please give more details on the Bug-Fixes in your release descriptions?
Hi,
when I see that you released a new toolchain version one of my first tasks is to review the changelog in your release notes. Then I can decide whether we are affected by any of the bugs found in the previous version and if it is necessary to switch to the newer version.
Unfortunately the very short bug-fix description in your latest release notes makes it very hard for me to decide whether a bug-fix is relevant for us or not. Can you please give a little bit more information on your bug-fixes?
For example in the release notes of GCC 4.8.4.201803-GNURX, you wrote “Fixed the handling of 64 bit addition”. Here I would be interessted in what was the problem with 64 bit additions in the previous version. Another example (in the same release notes): You wrote “Fixed an issue related to the libgen parsing of assembler options”. What did go wrong with the parsing of assembler options? Which assembler option was affected?
Thanks
Dear customer,
Building, maintaining, optimizing and enhancing a compiler is a daunting challenge. As a result, we are not able at this moment, due to time-related efforts and various other considerations, to provide detailed and thorough explanations of all issues that have been encountered, or that have been resolved from one release to another. Even if we did it for our own releases, all the legacy compiler versions lack such detailed descriptions, which would iterate to the very early origins of the toolchain, with no success at the very end.
To guide you through your challenge, we would suggest you take the following approach:
1. First, the release notes are doing a good job at documenting improvements and bug-fixes wherever necessary, from one release to another. This should be the first thing to investigate, and many times the issues described may be found in our public forums, so they may be easy to spot and understand. Often however, due to security concerns, licensing policies or other enterprise-focused concerns, such issues are not publicly disclosed and are not part of the public domain.
2. Second, the known issues in the release notes are your best helper to trace down any potential issues that the compiler might have, or might have had. All our releases undergo a highly detailed and thorough set of tests, designed to investigate potential problems or exceptional situations where issues might occur. If a known issue exists from our side, that we are fully aware of and can reproduce, we would certainly document it in the Release Notes, as part of the Known Issues area, and often you will also find easy workarounds these issues in the same place.
3. Finally, should the need to investigate further still pertain, the most straight-forward, yet highly-technical approach, would be to just analyze the source code differences from one release to another. We do warn about being cautious when taking this approach though, as it requires considerable efforts and time to follow through.
In special, limited situations, we would be able to provide you with direct explanations on what the updates or bug-fixes we have performed are about, from one release to another. However, to obtain information about a specific release’s updates and bug-fixes, please open up a private ticket and we will do our best to help out, if at all possible.
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Thank you,
The GNU Tools Team