C++ automatic template instantiation?

[Richard Kenner]

    > I know too little about gcc's internals to really understand why
    > Martin thinks -frepo is broken beyond repair...

    One problem is that there is a number of things that should work but
    don't, eg. producing libraries is difficult, and compiling with -S is
    not supported (as well as producing an executable directly from
    sources).

    The other (IMO more important) problem is that it will be always
    possible to trick the -frepo mechanism. For example, I believe
    recompilation currently does not take the GCC_EXEC_PREFIX variable
    into account (or any other environment variable). Also, never move any
    files around between compilation and linking, or recompilation won't
    find the original ones, anymore.

Perhaps I'm misremembering, but weren't these essentially the reasons
that RMS was so against putting in this code in the first place?