Re: Proposed gfortran development branch

[NightStrike <nightstrike at gmail dot com>]

On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 3:06 PM, Steve Kargl
<sgk@troutmask.apl.washington.edu> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 07:46:37PM +0100, Toon Moene wrote:
> >
> > I agree about the bisecting-in-case-of-bugs issue.
> >
> > However, what I see happening in practice is that all GCC developers
> > keep on doing their development work on branches - only the gfortran
> > developers are left out, because they do not have a branch.
> >
> > Of course we can create branches for all the subprojects that are
> > pending on the creation of a 4.4 branch and freeing up trunk - it just
> > doesn't seem very efficient to us.
> >
> > Of course I pleaded with the FSF (on the Steering Committee mailing list
> > *and* the gcc list) for speed in the case of the 4.4 branch - in vain.
> >
> > We might be heading for a fork a la the EGCS fork - and I don't like it.
> > ?It took a lot of effort (I was part of the EGCS cabal and I didn't
> > even do a lot of that foot-work).
> >
>
> "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it."
> George Santayana
>
> http://home.schmorp.de/egcs.html
>
> ?Why are we doing this? ?It's become increasingly clear in the course
> ?of hacking events that the FSF's needs for gcc2 are at odds with the
> ?objectives of many in the community who have done lots of hacking and
> ?improvment over the years. ?GCC is part of the FSF's publicity for the
> ?GNU project, as well as being the GNU system's compiler, so stability
> ?is paramount for them. ?On the other hand, Cygnus, the Linux folks,
> ?the pgcc folks, the Fortran folks and many others have done
> ?development work which has not yet gone into the GCC2 tree despite
> ?years of efforts to make it possible.
>
> This can be amended by replacing "so stability is paramount for them"
> with "so utopian philosophical pander is paramount for them"
>
> --
> Steve

http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2009-03/msg00439.html