> Date: Thu, 11 May 2023 18:30:20 -0400 > Cc: luang...@yahoo.com, gcc@gcc.gnu.org > From: Eli Schwartz <eschwart...@gmail.com> > > On 5/11/23 2:12 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote: > > > > He is telling you that removing support for these old features, you > > draw users away from GCC and towards proprietary compilers. > > > > One of the arguments in this thread _for_ dropping that support was > > that by not rejecting those old programs, GCC draws some users away > > from GCC. He is telling you that this change will, perhaps, draw some > > people to GCC, but will draw others away from GCC. The difference is > > that the former group will start using Clang, which is still free > > software (at least some of its versions), whereas the latter group has > > nowhere to go but to proprietary compilers. So the FOSS community > > will have suffered a net loss. Something to consider, I think. > > But I do not understand the comparison to -traditional. Which was > already removed, and already resulted in, apparently, at least one group > being so adamant on not-C that it switched to a proprietary compiler. > Okay, understood. But at this point that group is no longer users of > GCC... right? > > So what is the moral of this story?
See above: that repeating the story of -traditional could result in net loss for the FOSS movement. > To avoid repeating the story of -traditional, and instead make sure > that users of -std=c89 always have a flag they can use to indicate > they are writing old c89 code? No, the moral is not to introduce breaking behavior without very good technical reasons.
