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

[Joe Buck <jbuck at synopsys dot com>]

RMS writes:
> Do you really have so little respect for the GNU project that you
> smile at the idea of making a dishonest promise to it?

No dishonest promise was  ever made to the GNU  project (rather, since one
cannot make a promise to an abstraction,  no dishonest promise was made to
you).  You were told that there would be releases,  and you were told this
before the public was told about  egcs.  You were  also told that the egcs
team considered the project experimental and that this  is what the public
would be told.  However you were also told  that the bazaar model would be
used;  this   means that the   public would  be   *encouraged* to  bang on
experimental code, not discouraged as was done with gcc2.

The egcs team took a number of steps to avoid a permanent fork: it is
required that all contributed patches be assigned to the FSF; the GNU
coding standards were followed, etc -- the idea was to ensure that all
egcs code could be moved to an "official" gcc any time.  This is what
we meant by "no permanent fork" -- we were not going to create another
XEmacs.

Also, as was explained from the beginning, egcs was not simply
experimenting with patches to gcc.  It was, more than anything else, an
experiment with the gcc development model, heavily influenced by ESR's
famous paper as well as the success of the Linux kernel development.  Now,
we thought it would work but we did not know this.

The folks who started egcs formed a spectrum of opinion, and some of them
would have been fine with doing a fork.  This may be why you may feel that
the promises made were dishonest (also, since no one else but you and
Gumby were in on private conversations, we can't be sure that Gumby didn't
tell you anything inaccurate; if he did, I'm sure it was mistaken and not
intentional -- and I'm fairly sure that he told you that he was not the
boss of egcs).  But most of us, I think, wanted to reform gcc's
development, not split off from it.

When an experiment is conducted, the result is not always what
is expected.  Had egcs devolved into a mess, we could then have fished
out the "good stuff", cleaned it up, and sent it to gcc2 to integrate.
But egcs was wildly successful by any measure.

When there is an accepted treatment for a disease, and there is a new
treatment of unknown promise, it would be irresponsible for a physician
to recommend the new treatment, even if there were no regulatory
agencies.  So initially, there would be an approved treatment and an
experimental treatment.  But once the experiment proves its superiority,
it is no longer responsible to continue to recommend the traditional
treatment.  At that point, you will start to see pressure to remove the
"experimental" label.

When the same organization (in this  case, the FSF)  owns both the old and
new treatments, it should not be that difficult to manage a transition.