David, for some reason or other, I did not get your mail, so I will just reply copying in from the archive.
First, thanks for injecting some sanity into the discussion. I will not discuss RMS' personal shortcomings or the lack of them. In today's toxic political climate, such allegations are often made up and weaponized without an effective defense for the alleged wrongdoer. I don't know the truth of the matter, and I make a point of not finding out. > In many ways the last 8 years of my career have been > an attempt to get gcc to respond to the appearance of LLVM/clang (I've > added JIT-compilation, improved diagnostics, and I'm implementing a > static analysis pass) And this is highly welcome, and has made gcc (including gfortran) a much better compiler. I well remember how you implemented the much better colored error messages that gfortran has now. > Perhaps a pronouncement like: "try to make everything be consumable as > libraries with APIs, as well as as standalone binaries" might have > helped (and still could; can we do that please?) That makes perfect sense, as LLVM shows, and is something that the steering committee could decide for the project (or rather, it could issue a pronouncement that this will not be opposed if some volunteer does it). I think this could be as close to an unanimous decision as there can be among such a diverse community as the gcc developers. If the FSF takes umbrage at this, the ball is in their court.
