Objective-C bugs and GCC releases

[Alex Perez]

Mark Mitchell wrote:
> Gregory John Casamento wrote:
> 
>> If a rewrite is pending anyway, what's the harm in including a 
>> temporary fix in
>> a front end that the GCC committee doesn't consider to be worth 
>> stopping a
>> release for?
> 
> 
> There's no harm.  And the Objective-C maintainers are fully empowered to 
> include such a fix.
> 
>> It is my opinion that the policy of allowing ObjC to be broken in 
>> releases of
>> GCC should stop. 
> 
> 
> That's up to the Objective-C maintainers to ensure.  As the RM, I will 
> not hold up an otherwise good release because of Objective-C breakage.
> 

That's the thing, though...as far as I understand, and please, correct 
me if I am wrong, the GNUstep folk, developers, and community are not 
responsible for this lovely breakage. You're holding GNUstep, a GNU 
project, hostage to an outside corporation, Apple Computer, who surely 
has its own agenda and timetable. They can control exactly what GCC gets 
bundled with OS X. We do not have that luxury, as we can't control the 
version of GCC that gets bundled with every major distribution and BSD 
derivative. You will effectively be bending us over, and, as mentioned 
above, holding us hostage for a problem we did not create. IMHO, the 
steering committee needs to take some of the blame for their decisions, 
which have ultimately allowed this mess to occur by appointing certain 
people to certain places.

There are clearly massive personality conflicts here, which are evident 
to anyone who's been watching this increasingly-fiery exchange, which 
I'm quite proud to have had nothing to do with creating.

There are technical solutions to every problem, and except for the one 
person who actually proposed one, none of you folks, who are supposed to 
be responsible individuals, have done much to try to resolve this issue. 
It's simply degenerated to internal bickering, and bitching about how 
loosey-goosey the ObjC type system is, etc etc etc. ad infinitum.

Please, I am not a GCC hacker. I'm a normal GNUstep user, a simple open 
source project web admin, who is concerned that the actions of this 
development community threaten immediate viability of the GNUstep 
project.  Sit back for a moment and reflect on the hundreds, perhaps 
thousands, of man hours that these poor decisions may impinge upon.

I implore the GCC development community, and the Apple developers who 
checked in the code which caused these problems, (again, please correct 
me if I am wrong here, but AFAIK I am not) to examine their collective 
consciences instead of take such an impersonal and rude stance with 
regards to the dedicated GNUstep developers who work hard to make a 
product which, while you may not consider important, is considered 
important to plenty of others. Do not forget the other Objective-C 
users, such as the Swarm project (http://www.swarm.org) who may 
encounter problems if these issues are not resolved.

Hopefully, ultimately, we can all gain something from the rather 
venomous exchange which has previously ensued.

Respectfully,
Alex Perez
GNUstep.org co-maintainer
Concerned GNUstep user

P.S. I urge anyont who is reading this to respond to it in order to 
express their solidarity. Make sure it gets sent to gcc-devel and not 
just the GNUstep mailing lists, because doing the latter is merely 
preaching to the choir.