the GCC Project is a system vendor for GNU/Linux (Re: GCC vs GLIBC)

[Andy Tai <lichengtai at yahoo dot com>]

Hi, the GCC people plus the GLIBC people together are
a system vendoe, despite what Mr. Mitchell wrote; the
GNU Project aims to create a complete free system, and
official gcc releases plus glibc releases together
should be usable to create a working free system.  The
Linux distributors are beneficial, but they should not
be required--anyone should be able to build a
GNU/Linux system with the official releases from GCC
and GLIBC, without relying on another "system vendor."
And such vendors should not determine how to combine
system libraries like libgcc and glibc; they are not
the owners of this task; GCC people plus GLIBC people
are the owner.  (Practically, if different vendor
takes different routes for this it just add to further
potential fragmentation of Linux)

Thus Mr. Mitchell's consideration of avoiding putting
GCC into the roles of system vendor should be changed;
it should be OK to support "special magic" to work
together with GLIBC, if required.  This should not add
burden for core GCC developers; since GNU/Linux is so
popular, there are many people who can help with the
maintenance of this "special magic."  For other
systems where GCC is not the system compiler, GCC
developers can just work as normal. 

Conceptually, the GNU Project is a system vendor. The
Linux distributors are value-add system integrators
for GNU.

Thanks for your consideration.

an observer

Mark Mitchell wrote:
>*If* the system vendor decides to combine libgcc and
>libc, then packages
>will have different link dependencies depending on
>whether they were
>compiled with the system vendor's compiler, or with
>the FSF GCC
>distribution.  That's a cost/benefit for the system
>vendor to weigh;
>it's not our problem.
>
>I have faith in the system vendors to work out these
>problems.  They
>are better at it than we are, and they know more
>about their systems
>than we do.
>
>We don't
>have the expertise, and our goal is to support many,
>many systems; if
>we include special magic for GNU/Linux, we should do
>it for other free
>OS's too, and maybe non-free ones, and that places an
>additional burden
>on us that I don't think we should bear. 

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Get personalized email addresses from Yahoo! Mail
http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/