From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 21249 invoked by alias); 31 Jan 2003 13:53:58 -0000 Mailing-List: contact gcc-help@gcc.gnu.org; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: Sender: gcc-owner@gcc.gnu.org Received: (qmail 21242 invoked from network); 31 Jan 2003 13:53:58 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO vlsi1.ultra.nyu.edu) (128.122.140.213) by 172.16.49.205 with SMTP; 31 Jan 2003 13:53:58 -0000 Received: by vlsi1.ultra.nyu.edu (4.1/1.34) id AA01395; Fri, 31 Jan 03 08:56:44 EST Date: Fri, 31 Jan 2003 16:29:00 -0000 From: kenner@vlsi1.ultra.nyu.edu (Richard Kenner) Message-Id: <10301311356.AA01395@vlsi1.ultra.nyu.edu> To: lord@emf.net Subject: Re: GCC 3.3, GCC 3.4 Cc: gcc@gcc.gnu.org X-SW-Source: 2003-01/txt/msg01763.txt.bz2 The SC ought to, both directly and through a RM, stop inciting volunteerism for commerical purposes. Volunteerism is for the benefit of the volunteers and for the benefit of society as a whole. I'm not sure what you mean by the first part of this. Obviously, volunteers are important to the GCC development process and should be encouraged, but if you look at GCC's history, the vast majority of work on GCC has been done by companies that have a commercial interest in it. Are you really trying to *discourage* that work? For years, before there was commercial interest in GCC, there was no pressure for release schedules that would accomodate the needs of Apple, IBM, Red Hat or others. There should not be now. True to the most part, in that no one company's release schedule should dominate GCC development, but if we want the continued support of these companies, we do have to keep their collective neds (including schedules) in mind. It is _wrong_ for calls to change volunteer focus to bug-fixing to keep things "on schedule" in a context where the schedule is, in effect, imposed to accomodate the vendors. No, that's not the case. Our work has no benefit to *anybody* is we don't release it and frequent releases mean our work gets out to the user community faster. It is unfortunately the case that one of the serious problems with "volunteerism" is that volunteers mostly want to do "fun" work, which means hacking away and adding new optimizations. It's not fun to do the testing and bug-fixing, but that part is even more important than the other development work since few will use a compiler that doesn't work.