Please respect m-f-t, as is the custom on Debian lists?
]] John Paul Adrian Glaubitz > As I explained in my previous mail: The development task here is > something that goes a little beyond normal maintenance work and hence > requires someone to work with a longer dedication on the task. The required level of maintenance varies over time, that's completely normal, and I don't see how this changes anything. > While gcc is free software, it doesn’t mean the work on it is free. I > think we all know that without commercial support, free software > wouldn’t be able to survive these days. Of course not; everybody needs to put food on the table, one way or the other. Some of us are paid to work on Debian and free software and do it that way. Some do it during our free time, either because they earn enough that they can do it as a hobby or because they are a student with free time on their hands, or some other reason that makes it possible for them to contribute without getting paid for it. This hasn't really changed in a very long time. > > Keeping the toolchain working is a pretty essential requirement for > > keeping a port alive, and I don't think it's viable to base the ongoing > > toolchain maintenance for a port on fundraising. > > Maintenance isn’t the same as a one-time porting effort. Normal target > maintenance work is usually a matter of discovering bugs and fixing > them unless you are a port with commercial support where paid > developers are working on supporting new features and hardware on a > regular basis. Maintenance effort over time by far exceed the initial porting cost, so if the port isn't even able to surmount that, I don't think it's long-term viable. [...] > > As a general rule, I don't think Debian should pay developers to write > > software. (There are some exceptions such as outreachy, but they are > > few.) > > Does that mean you would agree to supporting the effort if the > developer came from a minority group? (It might actually be the case > here.) No, it means that there are situations where I think giving people from less-privileged backgrounds a leg up so they can start contributing might be appropriate. The suggested project does not sound like a project for somebody who is not already contributing to GCC. I guess you could try to do it as a GSoC project if it's in that ballpark. (I don't think «minority group» is a useful classifier; depending on how you slice it, we're all from some sort of minority group or another.) -- Tollef Fog Heen UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are
