2010/6/7 Kenneth Gonsalves <[email protected]>: > 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>
I came across this comment from one of the hurd developers on this topic. I thought it would be interesting to share here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1474941 "Later, as mentioned in other comments here, the ECGS fork of GCC caused issues - ultimately leading to the displacement of an FSF appointed project leader. There is some back story to that. The company Cygnus (later acquired by Red Hat, founded by M. Tiemann et al.) had been advertising to customers that not only could they develop customized extensions to GCC, but that they could shepherd those extensions into the "official releases". There was frustration at Cygnus and some other firms that the FSF branch was not merging these changes quickly enough or was arguably being too prickly about the nature of the changes. As nearly as I can tell those sentiments led to the ECGS fork and RMS was ultimately put in the position of having to choose between "blessing" that fork or simply losing any claim at all to the future of GCC." Thanks Praveen -- പ്രവീണ് അരിമ്പ്രത്തൊടിയില് <GPLv2> I know my rights; I want my phone call! <DRM> What use is a phone call, if you are unable to speak? (as seen on /.) _______________________________________________ ILUGC Mailing List: http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
