ancient history (was re: reduce dwarf debug size)

[Manuel López-Ibáñez]

What an interesting and unproductive discussion but I hope it ends
here or should I call somebody "a member of a German political party
very popular around 1940"? :-)

Cheers,

Manuel.


On 02/03/07, Joe Buck <Joe.Buck@synopsys.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 02, 2007 at 11:10:22AM -0500, Richard Kenner wrote:
> > > And indeed, while this is a controversial statement with which
> > > some people will disagree, I believe that that split was caused in
> > > part by commercial interests on both sides of the split (and I was
> > > there at the time).
> >
> > Indeed I disagree.  I'm not aware of any commercial interests on the FSF
> > GCC side.  As far as I can recall, the split was between the commercial
> > interests on the EGCS side and the non-commercial interests on the FSF
> > side.
>
> It was not anywhere near that simple; there were a number of disputes
> that had nothing to do with commercial interests (particularly the very
> sorry state of C++).  If your interpretation were correct, then after
> the split, the non-commercial idealists would have stayed with the FSF
> side of the split, but this didn't happen for the most part.
>
> You are right that there were concerns when it started that egcs would
> just be the Cygnus compiler, and one of the main purposes of the steering
> committee was precisely to prevent Cygnus from controlling it; the goal was
> to unify Cygnus "devo", pgcc, and f77, as well as have a portable compiler
> that worked on Linux: at the time, no FSF release would work on Linux,
> particularly for C++, you needed a bunch of horrible patches from HJ Lu.
>
> I could say much more (there are interesting stories about the
> behind-the-scenes politics) but it's off-topic.
>
>
>