On Sun, Apr 11, 2021 at 09:30:48AM -0400, Richard Kenner via Gcc wrote:
> > When it comes to deciding the direction of a project like GCC -
technical
> > and otherwise - in my mind it primarily should be those actually
involved
> > and contributing.
>
> GNU follows the general principle of the Free Software movement, that
> freedom for *users* is the priority. Assigning *higher* importance to
> developers' preferences is *not* a position I share.
I think there's a difference between philosophy and practicality here.
Sure, the importance of work done by different developers, measured on
the scale of advancing the goals of the Free Software movement, is
different for each. But what actually advances a project (which can
be viewed as "deciding [its] direction") is what work developers
choose to do, not the importance of each piece of work on that metric.
I guess my point is that the direction in which a project *does* go is not
always the direction in which it *should* go. I conceed that the converse
is also true: Technical experts are very useful for putting the brakes on
Joe Average User's crazy ideas when they are doomed to failure from the outset.
So I certainly agree with what you said above, but don't think that
changes the reality that it's ultimately what developers choose to
work on that most affects the direction of a project.
That indeed is often the reality, but equally as often *not* what is desired.
To give just one small practical example, I'm told (by people who are more
familiar with GCC internals than I) that it is not feasible with today's
GCC to port to backends which have a small number of registers. This has
meant that whole familys of CPUs work only with proprietary compilers.
J'
