dragonegg in FSF gcc?

[Paolo Bonzini]

On 04/13/2010 09:16 PM, Jack Howarth wrote:
> Paolo,
>     It is unclear to me what the original intentions were when the
> plugin infrastructure was created. That is, was it envisioned that
> FSF could accumulate the plugins directly in the source tree to
> ensure they were well maintained across FSF gcc releases?

Not really.  Plugins were added for people to be able to extend GCC in 
novel ways.  It was clear that some of these would circumvent GCC's 
copyleft, and so the runtime license exception was devised.  In this 
sense, dragonegg is not harmful to GCC; if you wrote a proprietary LLVM 
pass, the result would be not eligible for the runtime license exception.

However, I think there is another reason why dragonegg belongs in the 
LLVM repository.  It is very unlikely to be used by anyone who has no 
interest in LLVM, and vice versa many LLVM users will want to try it 
out.  GCC developers who otherwise won't use LLVM are the exception, in 
my opinion.

Similarly, if a gcc-clang existed it would belong in the FSF repository 
(probably on a branch) because (I think) hardly any LLVM user would be 
interested in it.

Paolo