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 hasn't the SC sent something to the FSF like: "We are grateful for your concern about the issues this licensing change and subsequent discussion has brought up. However, sadly, the amount of time it is taking to reach consensus on how/what to change has begun to seriously impede GCC development and it's future. Therefore, we request you resolve this licensing issue by March 28th, or we will have to branch and prepare the current GCC mainline for release, and wait until the next version to make any licensing changes. We regret this, but it is necessary in order to not further impede development of GCC and it's community" It's fairly clear what the view of the developer community is on this issue. At some point, if the FSF can't be a organization that responds to problems in a sane length of time, we shouldn't let them get in the way. --Dan
