AKA for everyone but me, who never read the readme.  For some reason I got pointed back to my old GCC 1.27 on MS-DOS article, and wanted to see when the 386 really did first appear, and after a bunch of messing around it was shipped in GCC 1.25

Sat Jul 16 14:18:00 1988 Richard Stallman (rms at sugar-bombs.ai.mit.edu)

* *386*: New files.

So there we are, July 16th 1988!

But looking a the ‘old-releases/gcc-1‘ directory there is no gcc-1.25.tar file! So how to get there from here?  Well the simple answer is to take gcc-1.27, and reverse patch it down using the patches in the patches directory.  The only catch of course is to read prior patches to the reverse to see if any files need to be renamed, otherwise there will be failures… specifically in the file gcc.diff-1.25-1.26

So normally I’ve always patched going up, but with the magical -R flag, you can go backwards!  So taking 1.27 you can go to 1.26 by running

patch -p1 -R < ../gcc.diff-1.26-1.27

And this will take 1.27 and downgrade it to 1.26.  As mentioned above the renames for going from 1.26 to 1.25 needs to be done in reverse:

Before installing these diffs, rename files as follows:

mv typecheck.c c-typeck.c
mv decl.c c-decl.c
mv parse.y c-parse.y
mv parse.h c-parse.h

so do the opposite, and then you can reverse diff.

For anyone who cares I put up the tar files on sourceforge here.