Re: GCC 3.3, GCC 3.4

[kenner at vlsi1 dot ultra dot nyu dot edu (Richard Kenner)]

    The SC ought to, both directly and through a RM, stop inciting
    volunteerism for commerical purposes.  Volunteerism is for the
    benefit of the volunteers and for the benefit of society as a whole.

I'm not sure what you mean by the first part of this.  Obviously, volunteers
are important to the GCC development process and should be encouraged,
but if you look at GCC's history, the vast majority of work on GCC has
been done by companies that have a commercial interest in it.  Are you
really trying to *discourage* that work? 

    For years, before there was commercial interest in GCC, there was no
    pressure for release schedules that would accomodate the needs of
    Apple, IBM, Red Hat or others.  There should not be now.  

True to the most part, in that no one company's release schedule should
dominate GCC development, but if we want the continued support of these
companies, we do have to keep their collective neds (including schedules)
in mind.

    It is _wrong_ for calls to change volunteer focus to bug-fixing to
    keep things "on schedule" in a context where the schedule is, in
    effect, imposed to accomodate the vendors.

No, that's not the case.  Our work has no benefit to *anybody* is we don't
release it and frequent releases mean our work gets out to the user community
faster.  It is unfortunately the case that one of the serious problems 
with "volunteerism" is that volunteers mostly want to do "fun" work, which
means hacking away and adding new optimizations.  It's not fun to do the
testing and bug-fixing, but that part is even more important than the
other development work since few will use a compiler that doesn't work.