On Fri, Mar 20, 2009 at 9:34 AM, Daniel Berlin <dber...@dberlin.org> wrote: > On Fri, Mar 13, 2009 at 2:28 PM, Joe Buck <joe.b...@synopsys.com> wrote: >> On Fri, Mar 13, 2009 at 10:25:34AM -0700, Richard Guenther wrote: >>> The topmost sentence should be unambiguous. Yes, the SC asked us not >>> to branch. >> >> The request came from RMS, the SC just passed it on. >> > There are two things here that bother me. > > 1. The occasional defending on the length of time it takes the FSF to > get back to us. Sorry, but this defense is, honestly, fairly silly. > Even the government agencies I work with aren't this slow. By the > time we have a response, members of the GCC developer community may > well be living on the moon. This doesn't mean they aren't good people > trying to do a good job, or seriously overworked. At some point, this > ceases to be a sane reason for something taking so long, and clearly, > it isn't something we should let affect our development schedule. > > 2. Where is the pushback by the SC onto the FSF? > Why haven't we given them a hard deadline, or even any deadline at all? > It's clear when they have no deadlines, they take forever to get > anything done. After all, if they are allowed to not prioritize it and > have no incentive to get their ass in gear and meet a deadline, what > exactly did we expect to happen other than it not getting done in a > reasonable amount of time?
Why do you think that the SC has not pushed back? Not all diplomacy is best done in public. This is frustrating for all of us. I am sorry that none of us on the GCC SC caught the ambiguity in the original runtime license. Re-opening a document for revisions is fraught with hazards because the GCC community is not the only party that wanted changes. That is what we have encountered. We need to ensure that we do not fix one problem, but end up with a license less acceptable to the community due to other changes. There apparently is a revised version of the license that addresses the concerns raised by the community. We are trying to get FSF to approve and release that text so that we may proceed. I agree that we cannot wait indefinitely. The FSF is having a meeting this weekend and hopefully they can resolve the license issue. The GCC Community has operated with a rather low amount of public drama relative to many FOSS projects and I think that has served us well. The customers and users of GCC are more than those intimately involved in FOSS projects and they appreciate a stable, professional project, not forks, fragmenting community, and rash decisions. We cannot be held hostage, but more people are watching than GCC insiders. David
