Re: Objective-C bugs and GCC releases

[Mark Mitchell <mark at codesourcery dot com>]

Zack Weinberg wrote:
> Alex Perez <aperez@student.santarosa.edu> writes:
>
>
> > Mark Mitchell wrote:
> >
> > > Gregory John Casamento wrote:
> > >
> > > > 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.
>
>
> No, see, look.
>
> This bug is only going to get fixed if someone decides to volunteer
> their time and effort fixing it.

Exactly.

In fairness, the Steering Committe did however make a conscious decision 
not to designate Objective-C a release-critical language.  That is 
because there are more features in GCC (support for languages, chips, 
optimizations, etc.) than there are people to maintain them all -- 
especially to keep them all working all the time in all possible cross 
products.  So, the SC makes decisions about what to make 
release-critical.  Things that aren't release-critical can still be 
fixed -- but it's just not a priority for the release.

In this case, the SC decided that C and C++ would be the only 
release-critical languages.  That's not an indication that Ada, Fortran, 
Java, and Objective-C are inferior languages in the eyes of the SC; it's 
merely a reflection of the fact that the focus of the SC, as an agent of 
the FSF, is on making the GCC a great compiler for the GNU system and 
the Linux kernel most of which is written in C and C++.  Furthermore, 
the focus on C and C++ reflects the desires of the various Linux and 
other free operating system distributors.

As the RM, I'd be very pleased to see this, and other problems, fixed -- 
but I will not hold up the release merely because of this bug.  As 
CodeSourcery has customers that use Objective-C, I'd love to see their 
needs met.  So, I'm all for fixing the bug -- but not at the expense of 
C or C++.

I would suggest that if you are deeply interested in fixing this problem 
you do what I did when I was deeply interested in having a better free 
C++ compiler: contribute to the development of the front end you care 
about.  Or, look at the GNU Services directory to find someone you might 
be able to hire to help.

Yours,

--
Mark Mitchell
CodeSourcery, LLC
mark@codesourcery.com
(916) 791-8304