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From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)
Subject: Re: what DOES the GPL really say?
Date: 1997/08/21
Message-ID: <dewar.872196853@merv>#1/1
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References: <5ph4g5$sbs$1@vixen.cso.uiuc.edu> <dewar.871738278@merv>
 <EF8J6w.7pv@kithrup.com> <dewar.872134707@merv>
 <5thahh$g19@fg70.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de>
Organization: New York University
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,gnu.misc.discuss
Date: 1997-08-21T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


<<I think you underestimate the people on that project.  At best, this will
become a quite stable release which will provide the free user community
with a stable, working gcc which can do RISC scheduling and which has
useful C++ templates.  The FSF, to whom all changes are assigned, can
then integrate them into 2.8 in whatever way they please.>>


Stability can only be achieved by being very careful and selective about
what changes are made. If that is the intention of the egcs project, then
that's too bad, since it seems to me the goals of a very free development
environment are better met by letting people experiment freely. If someone
has a neat bit of code that is 90% operational, and not very well documented,
then you certainly can't let it in to a building process that is aiming
at stablity, but the feature might still be very interesting to incorporate
and let people play with.

For example, during the recent round of development of exception handling
stuff for GCC, the developers on more than one occasion sent messages to
the effect of "well it is 90% working now, so why not go ahead and put it
in?" Quite approipriately, this was not considered to be in sufficiently
good shape to put into the mainline gcc development sources, but I would
hope that it WOULD be considered appropriate to put it into the egcs
project development, even if it were incomplete, not fully documented etc.

I don't think this has anything to do with the quality of people on the
project, it has to do with the fundamental goals. Perhaps I have 
misunderstood them, or perhaps they are not exactly clear yet.

Robert