Change to README ought to be reverted

[Jonathan "Duke" Leto]

Howdy,

I am -1 to making --optimize default, because it would mean needing to add,
test and change docs to have a --without-optimize flag, and then everyones
build scripts and statistics would need to take into account that optimization
became default at Parrot X.Y.Z. This seems like a lot of work for not
so much gain.

I am +1 to keeping moritz++'s change to the README, and telling people that
they should pass in --optimize by default, as Rakudo does.

I am +1 to making the mod_n test in t/op/number.t TODOed on darwin/ppc and g++.

Whoever wants to look into the bug, bless your soul.

> As an alternative, I propose that
> we make all release tarballs build with optimizations enabled by
> default.  This
> would mean we'll need more emphasis on testing optimized Parrots in the
> week before a release, but I don't think this will pose a meaningful
> difficulty.

I am not against optimized-by-default tarballs, but that means we would need
some kind of --without-optimize flag, and that release tarballs would be subtly
different from the corresponding commit in master. Also, if somebody uses

    perl Configure.pl

on master and then on a release, and benchmarks the two, they will be comparing
apples and oranges, which seems to fail the rule of least surprise.

As for testing optimized builds, all of our GCC Compile Farm machines run tests
under various combinations of configure flags, included optimized and not
optimized, so that is not an issue at all.

Duke


-- 
Jonathan "Duke" Leto <jonathan at leto.net>
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