On 04/13/2010 09:16 PM, Jack Howarth wrote:
Paolo,
It is unclear to me what the original intentions were when the
plugin infrastructure was created. That is, was it envisioned that
FSF could accumulate the plugins directly in the source tree to
ensure they were well maintained across FSF gcc releases?
Not really. Plugins were added for people to be able to extend GCC in
novel ways. It was clear that some of these would circumvent GCC's
copyleft, and so the runtime license exception was devised. In this
sense, dragonegg is not harmful to GCC; if you wrote a proprietary LLVM
pass, the result would be not eligible for the runtime license exception.
However, I think there is another reason why dragonegg belongs in the
LLVM repository. It is very unlikely to be used by anyone who has no
interest in LLVM, and vice versa many LLVM users will want to try it
out. GCC developers who otherwise won't use LLVM are the exception, in
my opinion.
Similarly, if a gcc-clang existed it would belong in the FSF repository
(probably on a branch) because (I think) hardly any LLVM user would be
interested in it.
Paolo
