Re: GCC2 merging (was "native language support now available")

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

    Perhaps it would be beneficial if you were to take a step back from
    the whole situation and ask yourself WHY there are so few volunteers
    to the GCC2 project any more, and why EGCS has almost more than they
    would need or want.

That's very clear and I said so in a message a while ago: when people
are volunteers, as opposed to being paid, they do what's the most fun.
And it's much more fun to work on a project where changes are less
controlled than one where they are more controlled.  As you say.

    Maybe (just MAYBE) another reason is that the model used by the EGCS
    team works better. I cannot speak for others (as much as I'd like to
    speak for R.J.L) but from my own experiences, I have had a FAR more
    pleasant experience working on EGCS than I ever did working on GCC2. 

Making sure that participants have fun is indeed an important part of
a successful project, but is hardly the only one.  And often that part
conflicts with more important parts.  Consider avionics software:
every minor change can needs hundreds of pages of documentation and
approvals of a dozen people.  It is not at all fun, but people who do
it get paid a lot and the software is highly reliable.

A more general fact is that most people don't like writing documentation.
They'll have much more fun if they don't have to write it at all.  So
the project that's the most fun will usually be the one with the
least documentation.  You can't look at the "fun factor" and try to
use that alone to rate the success of a project.