On 6/9/21 12:11 PM, Giacomo Tesio wrote:
Hi Gabriel,
On Wed, 9 Jun 2021 11:44:10 +0200 Gabriel Ravier via Gcc wrote:
Speaking on the "change it recklessly" issue, I would personally say
that SC has indeed arguably done this [...]
some people threatened to pull away from GCC entirely if it remained
tied to the FSF. I personally happen to agree with the change (which
seems to have especially avoided what would have been a painful split
that could have had disastrous consequences for GCC as a whole), but
find it rather disconcerting that such changes with potentially major
consequences were done without any direct discussion of them with the
community whatsoever.
Did you consider that, in fact, the lack of transparency of the
Steering Committee has shown since then (or even just the lack of
professionalism, when it comes to explicit intruduce major changes in
major versions) is a "disastrous consequence for GCC as a whole"?
I do consider that a lack of transparency is pretty bad, and that
discussions on subjects like this should be done in public, but I
wouldn't say it's just as bad as the potential risk that a fork would incur.
As for a lack of professionalism, I think it's pretty clear that GCC 11
is the cutoff point here, and although there might be some problems with
licensing bug fixes to old versions (which could not be reasonably
avoided unless GCC made no major releases until GCC 11.5 is out), there
isn't much reason to make a major version just for this when there was a
major version a month ago. Note that releases are done ~1 time per year,
so there isn't much FSF-copyrighted work "lost" with this.
Unilateral undiscussed changes by the Steering Committe is the new norm.
And such Steering Committee is in no way representing the interests of
the worldwide users of GCC, first because its members do not know them
(the vast majority is from the US, work for US corporations or both)
and second because they do not listen to any objection / request that
does not comes from their own circle / social group.
From what I know on this subject, the SC is meant to represent the GCC
community (those that actively participate in GCC development, at
least), and they are composed of well-recognized members of that
community. Adding in random unknown people to represent the "worldwide
users" of GCC would certainly not be taken well by the community and
would heavily hurt the credibility of the SC in the eyes of everyone
involved in working on GCC, which would consequently hurt the project.
You might have your own views on the subject, but I would prefer having
a credible SC that might not represent everyone in the world well than
have an SC representing everyone in the world that isn't trusted by the
people involved with the project (which could then result in the SC
becoming trusted... by the few people who remain after all those that
don't trust it leave).
Are you sure that an explicit fork with two projects with different
names and governance would had been worse than what GCC has become?
To be clear: From what I can see, the GCC project has effectively
declared their independence (which they already pretty much had, they've
just made it publicly clear) from the FSF in terms of who is at the helm
of the project. It is their right to do so, and they certainly had the
power to do so when the only power the FSF could exert over them was
very minor, with as the only leverage some minor reputation loss from
the loss of association with GNU and the DNS records for gcc.gnu.org. If
RMS wants to try to do anything, the most he can do is expel the SC as
the maintainers of the "GNU Compiler Collection", take the DNS records
for gcc.gnu.org and make a fork that would most certainly be considered
by everybody to be "FSF GCC" or something like that to distinguish it
from what would most certainly be the GCC basically everyone uses. The
only result of this would be that basically everyone would move over to
gcc-compiler.org or something like that, and the situation would be
functionally unchanged from what it is now.
Note: GCC as it has been for the past 2 decades was already a fork of
the original GCC: RMS just decided to accept EGCS (former name of the
current GCC) as the official version of GCC endorsed by GNU (this is why
it was already effectively independent).
Giacomo
