On Monday 07 June 2010 12:11:19 Praveen A wrote: > e development model was more cathedral style as long as RMS was the BDFL. > > "GCC development in the early days was a bit too conservative for the > tastes of many an eager hacker. Several of the frustrated developers > started their own forks of GCC in the hopes of getting their changes > much faster to end users. In 1997, several of these hackers got > together to create the EGCS project." > > "In April 1999, after a long period of behind-the-scenes negotiation, > EGCS and GCC reunited, and EGCS was accepted as the GNU Project's > official GCC." > > You can read the full story here http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/History >
from wikipedia (although it is not an authorative source) <quote> As GCC was free software, programmers wanting to work in other directions— particularly those writing interfaces for languages other than C—were free to develop their own fork of the compiler. Multiple forks proved inefficient and unwieldy, however, and the difficulty in getting work accepted by the official GCC project was greatly frustrating for many. The FSF kept such close control on what was added to the official version of GCC 2.x that GCC was used as one example of the "cathedral" development model in Eric S. Raymond's essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar. ... EGCS fork In 1997, a group of developers formed EGCS (Experimental/Enhanced GNU Compiler System),[11] to merge several experimental forks into a single project. The basis of the merger was a GCC development snapshot taken between the 2.7 and 2.81 releases. Projects merged included g77 (Fortran), PGCC (P5 Pentium- optimized GCC), many C++ improvements, and many new architectures and operating system variants.[12][13] EGCS development proved considerably more vigorous than GCC development, so much so that the FSF officially halted development on their GCC 2.x compiler, "blessed" EGCS as the official version of GCC and appointed the EGCS project as the GCC maintainers in April 1999. Furthermore, the project explicitly adopted the "bazaar" model over the "cathedral" model. With the release of GCC 2.95 in July 1999, the two projects were once again united. </quote> -- regards kg http://livejournal.com/lawgon _______________________________________________ ILUGC Mailing List: http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
