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

[Alexandre Oliva <oliva at dcc dot unicamp dot br>]

John Vickers <jvickers@acorn.com> writes:

> Alexandre Oliva wrote:

>> I haven't been testing gcc2 any more, because it doesn't include a
>> testsuite, which makes testing it much harder than egcs.  Furthermore,
>> I don't believe gcc2 is going to evolve any more.  I see no reason to
>> work on it, since egcs is doing that well.

> It's funny how more-or-less the same people seem to get a whole lot more
> done since egcs started.

It's not that funny.  As I see it, maintaining gcc was too much work
for a single person, even for someone as skilled as Richard Kenner.
His overload, as well as the fact that he sometimes sounded harsh (but
it's just the way he writes), has caused some people to give up
contributing to gcc.

Opening the development process, so that different tasks could be
taken care of by different people, has made it possible for egcs to
evolve as fast as it did, without overloading anyone (or rather
overloading a lot of people :-)

The Cathedral spirit has contributed very much to make people think of
Kenner as an adversary, rather than as one important member of the
team.  With the Bazaar model, the cooperation attitude is made much
clearer, since everybody can see all patches, comment on them, discuss 
them, up to the point that we agree on a good solution.

This is not what used to happen in the old model: Kenner would usually
discuss with the submitter of a patch in private, and this would make
him sound more like an adversary.

> What does specifically does gcc have these days, apart from the brand
> name ?

AFAIK, internationalization support is the only major improvement of
gcc that has not been imported into egcs yet.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva
mailto:oliva@dcc.unicamp.br mailto:aoliva@acm.org
http://www.dcc.unicamp.br/~oliva
Universidade Estadual de Campinas, SP, Brasil