Re: Will tree-ssa be GCC 3.5?

[Steven Bosscher <s dot bosscher at student dot tudelft dot nl>]

On Monday 01 December 2003 16:02, Richard Kenner wrote:
> "GCC developers" are not a homogeneous set of people.  Some people
> currently doing work on GCC are indeed people who are not used to
> dealing with schedules, but many others are.

True.  But the bulk of the work is done by people who can deal with schedules 
(and also get paid for their contributions).

>  However, nobody can work
> on "specific schedules" without specific *funding* for those schedules
> because projects that *are* funded will take priority.

So there's your chicken-and-egg problem.  There is money out there, but it 
depends on this work being finished at some given date&time.  And this work, 
you claim, may not be finished by then because people cannot work on it 
without funding.

This sounds a lot like the "MS vs. OSS innovation" debate ;-)

> If you want something done, you need to approach specific people who
> are doing the work and solicit proposals from those people as to
> funding and schedules.

Those specific people will want to know that the rest of the GCC contributors 
will support them.  In the case of tree-ssa for example, this means that 
there has to be consensus that this project makes sense, can make a real 
improvement and therefore has to be included in release x.y.  You need a 
development plan and a timeline for that.  GCC has neither...

Gr.
Steven