Re: Compiler for Red Hat Linux 8

[Joern Rennecke <amylaar at redhat dot com>]

> 	Red Hat employs a large number of highly skilled GCC developers.
> If GCC 3.0 or the GCC trunk is not stable enough / correct enough to use
> in a GNU/Linux distribution, Red Hat's developers can work to improve and
> stabilize a particular FSF GCC source base as effectively as any other GCC
> source base.

That is not true.  Contributing to the FSF GCC sources requires patch
review, which often doesn't happen.

> 	Red Hat's GNUPro "devo" source base is synchronized with the FSF
> sources and, therefore, contains roughly as many problems as the FSF
> sources.  A Red Hat 8 branch in GNUPro would need a similar amount of
> stabilization work and performance improvement as the FSF sources.

Our tree contains infrastructure to enable our Q/A to work.
Moreover, you forget the issue of support.  We need control of
the versions that we support.  We can't have third parties check
in changes to our software just before we ship it.
The GNUpro source base also has changes so that there are no spurious
bug reporting instructions.
And sometimes we need to be able to keep track of how patches relate
to customer problems, even if the problem description contains
confidential information.
Hence, we need a repository that is not world-readable.

> 	Maybe Red Hat could request a branch in the FSF GCC repository to
> which they could have exclusive write access for their own development
> effort -- using their own patches and acceptance criteria?  Maybe the
> generic "GNU/Linux GCC" branch for all distributors, which another person
> proposed, is the solution.

Why should we (FSF gcc developers) have a GNU/Linux GCC branch?  Why not
use the latest release branch.  Then the patches will automatically be
included in the next bug fix release.