Re: Proposed gfortran development branch

[Steve Kargl <sgk at troutmask dot apl dot washington dot edu>]

On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 07:46:37PM +0100, Toon Moene wrote:
>
> I agree about the bisecting-in-case-of-bugs issue.
> 
> However, what I see happening in practice is that all GCC developers 
> keep on doing their development work on branches - only the gfortran 
> developers are left out, because they do not have a branch.
> 
> Of course we can create branches for all the subprojects that are 
> pending on the creation of a 4.4 branch and freeing up trunk - it just 
> doesn't seem very efficient to us.
> 
> Of course I pleaded with the FSF (on the Steering Committee mailing list 
> *and* the gcc list) for speed in the case of the 4.4 branch - in vain.
> 
> We might be heading for a fork a la the EGCS fork - and I don't like it. 
>  It took a lot of effort (I was part of the EGCS cabal and I didn't 
> even do a lot of that foot-work).
> 

"Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it." 
George Santayana

http://home.schmorp.de/egcs.html

  Why are we doing this?  It's become increasingly clear in the course
  of hacking events that the FSF's needs for gcc2 are at odds with the
  objectives of many in the community who have done lots of hacking and
  improvment over the years.  GCC is part of the FSF's publicity for the
  GNU project, as well as being the GNU system's compiler, so stability
  is paramount for them.  On the other hand, Cygnus, the Linux folks,
  the pgcc folks, the Fortran folks and many others have done
  development work which has not yet gone into the GCC2 tree despite
  years of efforts to make it possible.

This can be amended by replacing "so stability is paramount for them"
with "so utopian philosophical pander is paramount for them"

-- 
Steve