Re: what DOES the GPL really say?

[kenner@lab.ultra.nyu.edu (Richard Kenner)]

In article <5uqh3g$1to$1@bbj.freenix.fr> card@bbj.freenix.fr (Remy Card) writes:
>Well, I find quite interesting that a project that is not supposed
>to "directly produce anything for the public" allows us to get snapshots
>(and maybe releases) of their compiler. 

That's indeed one of the experimental aspects of the project: to see the
effects of making experimental compilers generally available.  Among the
possible results are the bad result of people getting confused between
the stable and experimental versions and the good result of people who get
the versions contributing to fixing the problems in them.

>Hmmm, when I read the "Tired of waiting..." thread, I got the
>impression that people working on the g++ part were quite frustrated
>that a new release of gcc/g++ did not happen, because they had much a better
>c++ compiler and they had to wait for the FSF gcc maintainers to say "Ok,
>it's time to release a new version of gcc/g++", even if they got reports
>for bugs that they had fixed one year ago...

That doesn't make much sense for two reasons:

(1) The startup of the EGCS project is far more likely to slow down
the final testing of GCC 2.8.0 (and hence release) than speed it up
since the people who would otherwise be working on that task are now
splitting their efforts between that and EGCS.

(2) The EGCS project is just starting up and the 2.8 cycle is coming
to an end.  The goals of the EGCS project are to things *after* the
2.8 cycle, not of that cycle itself.

>Are you kidding?  Can you seriously say "a few months" when the
>last release of GCC is 2 years old? :-)

Yes.  The point is that had EGCS been around two years ago, the
work that we held up GCC 2.8 for would have been shunted off to it
and we would have been at 2.10 by now.

>I don't know anything about compilers, but I like how egcs is
>developped and made available to testers on a regular basis.  If the egcs
>developpers happen to have a version that is stable enough to be available
>as a release, I will certainly use it and not use the FSF gcc anymore.

There's some confusion here.  Once a change has been shown stable
enough within the EGCS framework, it gets put into the mainstream
and EGCS goes on to test *other* unstable changes.