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

[James Mansion <james at westongold dot com>]

> From: Richard Stallman [mailto:rms@gnu.org]
>     How do you propose to progress this - is there even a real issue
>     beyond turf war?
> 
> I'm open to having the EGCS team become the GCC maintainers
> and making EGCS the official version of GCC.
> 

I suspect that in the end that may be pretty much forced.

But, given that there is one project that is supposed to be very stable,
and another that is supposed to be experimental, would it be possible to
take a hybrid approach?

Suppose that 'gcc' picked up stable egcs releases (eg the 1.1 release)
but was not impacted by the development tips on egcs?

If kenner's objections are essentially related to 'stability' and
the management of the process, then it seems (perhaps naively)
that it should be possible to define acceptance criteria in terms
of test cases and formal regression tests and win all round.  It
does have to be the case that any delay in taking the egcs team's
view of what constitutes a stable release over to gcc would need
to be managed by a public process, or the PR situation will not
improve at all.  If lack of documentation is a problem, then that
would be fair and I suspect that it might actually force the pace
here in a positive way.

Of course, no-one I know particularly likes to have a task that is
'just maintenance'.  But this would make 'gcc' essentially an
acceptance management process, and I'd guess that if bugs have been
found then there would be volunteers to integrate and test fixes
that might otherwise have been made to the egcs tree only.

James

(yeah - and can we *please* review the LGPL?  It does not seem to
make any practical sense for template systems or C++ inlines in
general.)