On Sun, 16 Mar 2008, Mark Mitchell wrote: > Richard Guenther wrote: > > >> I support the final-release-then-close approach. But can we get a > >> volunteer to convert that branch to GPLv3... ? > > > > I strongly object to moving the 4.1 brach to GPLv3. > > I too think that it would be a bad idea to switch the 4.1 branch to > GPLv3,
Can you please elabortate why? I've heard one rationale, which is that distributors would need to maintain separate forks of their 4.1 trees. I agree that's bad up to a point. But distributors have always to some extent maintained their own set of internal patches. E.g. Debian results list lots of internal patches: http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-testresults/2008-03/msg01125.html http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-testresults/2008-03/msg01123.html http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-testresults/2008-03/msg01124.html However there is a class of users who don't get their compiler from distributors, but who also want the safety of using official releases and not some random svn checkout. These users are missing one year's worth of bugfixes. They may not want to upgrade to 4.2.x for technical reasons. So how far do we, wearing our FSF maintainer hats, bend over to accommodate distributors at the expense of other classes of users? By "how far" I mean for how long do we maintain the status quo? If we agree at some point to close the branch, it's only fair to do a final release so the latter class of users get the same benefit that the clients of distributors have had. Thanks, --Kaveh -- Kaveh R. Ghazi [EMAIL PROTECTED]
