[For the fortran people: Discussion on gcc@] Just a general remark.
There are people, such as myself, who regularly mess up their git repositories because they have no mental model of what git is doing (case in point: The Fortran unsigned branch, which I managed to put into an unrepairable state despite considerable help from people who tried to help me fix it). This is especially true of volunteer maintainers, who are still the mainstay of gfortran. Whatever you end up doing, consider such maintainers, and if they still can contribute or would simply give up. If what you end up doing is too complicated, it may end up severely impacting the gfortran project (and possibly others). Best regards Thomas