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Re: Objective-C bugs and GCC releases
Mark Mitchell wrote:
Gregory John Casamento wrote:
If a rewrite is pending anyway, what's the harm in including a
temporary fix in
a front end that the GCC committee doesn't consider to be worth
stopping a
release for?
There's no harm. And the Objective-C maintainers are fully empowered to
include such a fix.
It is my opinion that the policy of allowing ObjC to be broken in
releases of
GCC should stop.
That's up to the Objective-C maintainers to ensure. As the RM, I will
not hold up an otherwise good release because of Objective-C breakage.
That's the thing, though...as far as I understand, and please, correct
me if I am wrong, the GNUstep folk, developers, and community are not
responsible for this lovely breakage. You're holding GNUstep, a GNU
project, hostage to an outside corporation, Apple Computer, who surely
has its own agenda and timetable. They can control exactly what GCC gets
bundled with OS X. We do not have that luxury, as we can't control the
version of GCC that gets bundled with every major distribution and BSD
derivative. You will effectively be bending us over, and, as mentioned
above, holding us hostage for a problem we did not create. IMHO, the
steering committee needs to take some of the blame for their decisions,
which have ultimately allowed this mess to occur by appointing certain
people to certain places.
There are clearly massive personality conflicts here, which are evident
to anyone who's been watching this increasingly-fiery exchange, which
I'm quite proud to have had nothing to do with creating.
There are technical solutions to every problem, and except for the one
person who actually proposed one, none of you folks, who are supposed to
be responsible individuals, have done much to try to resolve this issue.
It's simply degenerated to internal bickering, and bitching about how
loosey-goosey the ObjC type system is, etc etc etc. ad infinitum.
Please, I am not a GCC hacker. I'm a normal GNUstep user, a simple open
source project web admin, who is concerned that the actions of this
development community threaten immediate viability of the GNUstep
project. Sit back for a moment and reflect on the hundreds, perhaps
thousands, of man hours that these poor decisions may impinge upon.
I implore the GCC development community, and the Apple developers who
checked in the code which caused these problems, (again, please correct
me if I am wrong here, but AFAIK I am not) to examine their collective
consciences instead of take such an impersonal and rude stance with
regards to the dedicated GNUstep developers who work hard to make a
product which, while you may not consider important, is considered
important to plenty of others. Do not forget the other Objective-C
users, such as the Swarm project (http://www.swarm.org) who may
encounter problems if these issues are not resolved.
Hopefully, ultimately, we can all gain something from the rather
venomous exchange which has previously ensued.
Respectfully,
Alex Perez
GNUstep.org co-maintainer
Concerned GNUstep user
P.S. I urge anyont who is reading this to respond to it in order to
express their solidarity. Make sure it gets sent to gcc-devel and not
just the GNUstep mailing lists, because doing the latter is merely
preaching to the choir.