> Maybe if you spent less time worried about inconsequential things
> like people's "offensive" language, and more time worried about how
> your country (you live in the Western world, correct?)
We are all responsible for our choice of words. We aren't responsible
for the actions or policies of
> A "file name" is the file's name. It is a property of a file, like the
> inode or size. The name exists (or not) regardless of whether we know
> what it is.
>
> A "filename" is a syntactic element, the thing itself, a string of
> characters. It is supplied as input or rendered as output.
> A Certification Mark is the proper way to formally and legally enforce such
> requirements.
BTW, nobody is or was at all confident that the Ada mark was legally
enforcable. I'm in the camp that it isn't.
> telling people they cannot patch the source code without permission
Nobody is telling
> In order to be a validated Ada compiler, a compiler must pass
> an extensive suite of programs called the Ada Compiler Validation
> Capability (ACVC).
FYI: the current name for this is ACATS: Ada Conformity Assessment Test
Suite.
>"to be able to use the word rust in a distribute
> Normal use of a word isn't something that Trademarks prevent.
In general, no, but what it prevents is using the word in a way that
would produce confusion with an "official" use of that mark. If the
word that constitutes the mark is too general, then the trademark
shouldn't have been granted.
> If these bureaucratic parasites (but I repeat myself) don't want to
> use GCC, or Clang, then they can write their own compiler suite from
> scratch. Doubt that's going to happen, so this "investigation" is
> simply yet another frivilous waste of taxpayer dollars.
I won't blame this on bureaucra
> I think you are misinterpreting when you need a trademark license for
> usage a word mark in an implementation of a compiler for a programming
> language. Note that gcc used to come with a full implementation of the
> Java programming language, compiler, runtime and core library
> implementation
> just as with the Java Trademark, you as developers can say "gust is
> compatible with the rust language" but you *cannot* say "gust is
> compatible with rust".
Note that trademarks are adjectives, not nouns (and only apply to specific
nouns, so I'm not sure what you mean here.
> Should this question be posed to the Linux distribution that NASA is using?
Yes, most likely. But exactly how Free Software fits into the
Buy America Act (what she's talking about) is less than clear.
> > What about the parts of GCC with FSF copyrights that are not covered by
> > the GPL, but the GPL with exceptions? How is it possible to move code
> > between the parts if a contributor previously used DCO and thus gave
> > only permission to license under the open source license "indicated in
> That would surely only be relevant if people wanted to use their
> telephones to compile code?
That's not completely clear. It would certainly be true if the compiler
were included on the phone, whether or not the compiler was actually used.
But I was more addressing the general comment that
> Just for the record, Google has no problem with the GPLv3. Google stopped
> working on GCC because they made a company decision to use clang instead.
> That decision was made for technical reasons, not licensing reasons.
But note that some cellphone manufacturers (e.g, Samsung) have taken
steps
> Troubling indeed, but this might just be an overzealous manager.
> IBM, like other corporations, has made significant technical
> contributions to GCC over the years, for example the scheduler and
> the vectorizer, and thus has assigned the copyright of these
> contributions to the FSF.
Yes, as
> You are an IBM employee 100% of the time.
For those who aren't aware of it, this has been IBM's position for
many decades. It's not a new position. But they are unique in the
extremeness of their position on this, so generalizing this would be a
mistake.
> It is an argument against the idea that LLVM is the default way that
> people choose.
I don't think that anybody made the argument that LLVM is the "default"
in any sense. What's being given here are reasons why some people
prefer LLVM over GCC.
> In those places, they don't trust Microsoft o
> So I think it's quite reasonable to expect that their employers could
> read the SC's secret exchanges (since they technically CAN read them).
I'm a bit lost here. What do you think is the content of "the SC's
secret exchanges"?
> Depends on the use cases. Not in military surveillance. And certainly not
> at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. At Boeing could be the same, but
> I'm not sure. Before 2011, rather than building things from scratch,
> washington bureaucrats simply picked from among existing technology.
> You will not get funding grants in the US if you mention free software,
> because the US Department of Commerce does not allow it.
This is not correct and I suspect is a misunderstanding of what
"government data rights" means.
> >> It would be usefull to clarify with the FSF and GNU what the
> >> actual relations are,
> > Why? What would that gain? I go back to my analogy of the British Queen.
> > What would be gained by "clarifying" that if she actually intervenes
> > non-trivially in the government of any Commonwealt
> The authority of the FSF, GNU and RMS over GCC is and has been a
> fiction for decades,
For the most part, I agree.
> It would be usefull to clarify with the FSF and GNU what the
> actual relations are,
Why? What would that gain? I go back to my analogy of the British Queen.
What would be ga
> The choice to /not/ have a policy for ejecting jerks has serious costs.
> One of those costs is the kind of rancorous dispute that has been
> burning like a brushfire on this list the last few weeks.
Although I agree with the sentiment, there's a real risk that if we
were heading in that direct
> The choice to have a policy for ejecting jerks has serious costs.
> One of those costs is the kind of rancorous dispute that has been
> burning like a brushfire on this list the last few weeks.
I agree. Look at the huge ongoing debate about Section 230 in the US
that's been going on for at leas
> For developers, I think the GPL matters very much. It introduces
> fairness in the contribution process - companies and individuals
> can contribute code knowing that it can't be taken away and locked
> up, to be modified, sold and distributed as binary packages
> (eg. Nvidia).
Note that this di
> 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 agree. And depending on people's "political" views, that can either be
an advantage or disadvantage of the free software development model.
> To give just one small pr
> Then it would not longer be GCC. It would be something different.
> The whole point of GCC is to provide a free software compiler for the
> GNU system and systems based on GNU, and not to be pragmatic at the
> cost of software freedom.
Certainly that was its initial intent, but I'd argue that a
> I feel like this should be even more evident when dealing with
> something like a compiler toolchain. GCC's user is likely to be
> another free software project's contributor (as is my case).
I suspect that's not true. It certainly wasn't true when more major
large companies used GCC to compile
> > 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. Assi
> The principle by which high level decisions in all GNU projects have
> always been made is how it best helps the GNU system as a whole.
> Contributors are exactly that. They offer *contributions* - the
> very meaning of the word implies there is no expectation of anything
> in return. Obviously
> 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.
I agree, but I'm not clear if you're claiming that that is or is not
currently the case. I believe it is.
> > > So, that's a solid 'no' on the likelihood of you contributing
> > > anything of value to the discussion of GCC governance then?
> >
> > I really think that most of the people replying on this thread have a
> > much more encompassing view of "GCC governance" than actually exists.
>
> If the c
> But it's quite obvious, after you removed RMS's oversight on SC's decisions.
The SC is the "GNU maintainer" for GCC. The GNU project has oversight on
the maintainers of every GNU project, including GCC. The change to the
web page didn't affect that: RMS still has oversight on the SC's
decision
> So, that's a solid 'no' on the likelihood of you contributing
> anything of value to the discussion of GCC governance then?
I really think that most of the people replying on this thread have a
much more encompassing view of "GCC governance" than actually exists.
> Just for the record, I was not talking about developers but about
> the leadership of the project, Ian.
>
> 8 out of 13 members of the Steering Committee are from US-corporations.
I don't think I'd consider the Steering Committee "the leadership of
the project". In what sense do they "lead" th
> Having one guy at the top from whom all power flows.
>
> Power does not "flow" from RMS. Since you have used a political analogy:
> I think it is more akin to a constitutional monarchy.
I think it's like the Queen of England. As a British person I used to
know said: "The Queen of England
> Yet enough to slow down certain developments such as Nathan's libcody
> or the plugin framework.
The SC had no role in that, as was discussed here.
> You can also put trustworthy and credible observers to protect the
> interests of the global Free Software movement.
How is an "observer" going
> I'm scared by the dangerous influence that dangeours US corporations
> and a dangerous military nation with a long history of human rights
> violations (see Snowden's and Assange's revelations and the ongoing
> Assange's trial) HAVE over the GCC development.
I agree that that's a concern, but th
> If RMS had ever done the same (pretty unlikely, Fortran isnt't his
> thing), I would have done the same without thinking twice about it.
I agree with that sentiment. The fact that somebody has a certain
role doesn't necessarily mean that the question is asked with that hat
on: it may be nothing
> They claim that university owns copyright to my code if I wrote it
> for a school-related research project.
That's potentially correct. And the purpose of them signing the
disclaimer is to release that interest so that only you need to sign
the assignment.
The other way of doing it would be f
> 3. Most of claims about Stallman are not true (to be more precise -
> they are deliberately misrepresent what Stallman said to make his
> views to look immoral).
I would like to suggest that this discussion will go better without
making accusations that people are "deliberately" doing something.
> I respect that you want stay out of the discussion, but I think that to
> present this as some larger societal issue which is somewhat academic
> is wrong.
Sorry, I didn't mean to say or imply that. What I meant to say is
that the very specific discussion we're having in this forum *mirrors*
t
> For a leadership position, which serves as an example for
> the community and to some extent demonstrates the values shared by the
> community, I think it is reasonable that there is a decreased
> expectation of privacy.
.. and libel and defamation laws in the US reflect that, for example.
> I think I will leave this discussion up to those who have more
> familiarity with the guy than I do. There's no doubt that some of the
> stuff Stallman has written creeps me the hell out, and I think it was
> more the tone of the OP I objected to.
I mostly want to stay out of this and will le
> I believe RCS was initially used circa 1992 on the FSF machine which
> held the canonical GCC sources.
Your memory agrees with mine.
> That depends on your local copyright law. Some, like the US, have
> language saying that copies necessary for usual operation are *not*
> covered under copyright.
I'm refering to US law. Where, precisely, is the language you are
referring to? Note that there are two separate issues:
(1) Wheth
> Remember that, from the perspective of copyright law, executing a
> program is making a "copy"
> of that program.
>
> Has that (rather extreme) view been litigated?
That's actually not extreme, but pretty accepted. And yes, that has
been litigated. And you can see that in the G
> I have questions about the GCC Runtime Library Exception.
Note that nobody can give you definitive answers to questions like this
since they haven't been litigated. So any answer is an "educated guess".
Having said that ...
> When an equipment vendor distributes an update of shared gcc runtime
> Hasn't GNAT sorted Ada elements in records (e.g. structures) by size
> since near its initial addition to GCC in the mid-90s?
No, it wasn't done early on and it was never done in that major a way
now. Most reordering (possibly all; I'm not sure) is done between
objects of variable and fixed si
> binaries was provided for my company with toolchain for cortus mcu
> development. They are proprietary and compiled for windows. I can't send
> those for you, because I signed NDA
> this is (1) violation.
Although the GPL doesn't specifically allow it, there are cases where
GPL'ed software ca
> But I can't find nir Cortus architecture on gcc official support page,
> nor sources on Cortus site.
>
> Manufacturer is producing billions MCU worldwide and toolchain is
> closed-sources, but based on gcc. How is this possible?
Can you show us where the binary download is located? What make
> But this is against GNU policy for ChangeLog entries. Explanations of
> the change should go into the source code, as comments.
No, explanation of the *code* should go into the source code, as comments.
The source code is not the place for a history of the form:
"In 1999, this code did XYZ, bu
> GCC ChangeLogs don't record the purpose of the change. They say what changed,
> but not why.
That depends on how you define "purpose". Let's take a random entry,
from a 1999 change of mine:
* expr.c (expand_expr): If ignoring reference operations,
just expand the operands.
> After 20 years of hacking on GCC I feel like I have literally wasted
> days of my life typing out ChangeLog entries that could have easily been
> generated programmatically.
>
> Can someone refresh my memory here, what are the remaining arguments for
> requiring ChangeLog entries?
I take the
> > GCC steering community I count on you and speaking behalf other
> > developers to keep GCC as close to C as possible for at least the next
> > 1000 years.
>
> We've already made a decision to use C++ when it makes sense. That ship
> sailed years ago.
I don't see "keeping GCC as close to C as
> My secret desire is that once we get this done we would drop these
> silly ChangeLogs. Although I'm not a kernel developer, I kind of like
> the Linux kernel style, where the commit msg contains a reasonably
> in-depth motivation for the change, sort of like the email message one
> sends to gcc-p
> It looks like MISRA should adjust its rules if it wants to support
> open source.
I can think of no reason why MISRA would want to do that given their
goals. Can you?
> I suppose that would be true if you refer to MISRA in the messages.
> If you don't then you're not using the trademark.
The issue isn't the messages. but how you describe what you've done
in, say, documentation or ChangeLog entries. If you claim, in any
way, that you're checking for "MISRA comp
> But as for a license, it's hard to see why that might be. You can't
> copyright rules (only a particular expression of same, and only to
> the extend that the "sweat of the brow" rule doesn't apply). And it
> doesn't sound like patentable matter either. That said, if some
> outfit thinks it ca
> Regardless of that sort of issue, I think on previous occasions when the
> topic of MISRA (or other coding standard) checking came up, there has
> been a general opinion from the gcc developers that the compiler itself
> is not the best place for this sort of checking - they recommend an
> extern
> I don't think that employer interests have led to any significant
> conflicts between employer interests and project interests. It's sort
> of hard to say, though, because in effect employer interests have
> become project interests.
And indeed many people who've been working on GCC for a lon
> The Ada frontend was developed at AdaCore.
The Ada frontend was developed at NYU, as an Air Force-funded project
to show that Ada95 (then called Ada9X) was implementable. AdaCore was
later formed once that was complete to provide commercial support for
the Ada compiler. The members of that NYU
> And hell, GCC already includes a lot of really really obscure
> builtin functions which are one hell of a lot less common & useful
> than multiply-hi&lo.
Which exactly proves the point that people are making: whether
something is "common & useful" is rarely the criteria that's used in
deciding w
> It *isn't* "putting every possible feature into every language."
> Did I ever advocate that?
Yes. When you say "X is a useful feature, therefore we should put it
into language Y", you are indeed implicitly advocating that. Because
if that were *not* the case, then saying that X is *useful* say
> OK, you just said you've used packed nybble arrays a couple of times.
> Multiplying you by 100,000 that proves if you put it in GCC,
> you'd save 200,000 programmer hours, which is equivalent to saving
> over 2 lives.
I would suggest that you spend time learning basic principles about
language d
> Yes, the address space stuff is posterior, but the Pmode thing is verbatim.
Doesn't ring a bell. Sorry. I don't even remember what the other
option would be other than Pmode.
> REFERENCE_TYPEs and POINTER_TYPEs are (should be) treated almost equally in
> the compiler, the difference matters
> The commit from 2001 has your name on it. It's called from gigi:
>
> /* Show that REFERENCE_TYPEs are internal and should be Pmode. */
> internal_reference_types ();
Hmm... what else would REFERENCE_TYPEs be? I remember none of this and
it's clear that it was later changed because of the
> Only Richard K. might remember the details. Possibly for
> IA-64/HP-UX -milp32. In any case, having a different representation
> for pointers and references is a recipe for annoying issues like
> this, so removing the kludge is OK with me.
I don't think I added that. In fact, I'm not sure wha
> As such, you'll need the passwd file from there. I don't think we
> had any such thing as a maintainers file in those days.
Correct.
> wood = wood
Likely Tom Wood (w...@dg-rtp.dg.com)
> These are good examples of things the costing model
> simply wasn't ever designed to consider -- because they weren't
> significant issues on the m68k, vax and other ports in the gcc-1 era.
>
> So I don't really know how to tell you to proceed -- I've considered the
> costing models fundamen
> (Assuming it's a goal of this standard to be human parseable to more
> than a few dozen people on the planet.)
Unfortunately, that's rarely a goal of most standards. ;-)
> Is gcc meant to only be used to compile FOSS?
> If that's your agenda, you're right - I don't see how you can use a
> feature like WPP.
>
> But is that really what gcc aims for? Not to allow people working on
> close-source software to enjoy it?
It's one thing to say that we're building a compi
> What WPP does, is it runs during pre-compilation, and replaces the
> string in each call to a trace macro, with an obfuscated string.
And why would a writer of Free Software want to do such a thing?
> Well it seems to be able to report a lot of syntax errors even if
> they're close together, so it must be getting back on its feet fairly
> quickly. I don't know how that works. Maybe it just scoots along to
> the next semicolon or maybe you explicitly have productions like "if
> (syntax error) {
> I reckon it's a bad idea to make source browsing info with a separate
> program like cscope or etags. I reckon it's the compiler's job.
One of the issues with soure browsing is that you want to be able to do
it in the presence of syntax errors. That can make it harder for the
compiler to do it
> > and wondering if anyone can explain to me what's wrong with this
> > transformation. Having worked through all four cases of A and C1
> > positive and negative, it seems to me that the extra bits 'fed in' to
> > the most-significant end of the result are the same either way (i.e. the
> > XOR of
> If a release is made, then the copyright dates ought to be updated in
> files that have changed, at least that's always been my understanding.
Yes, but that update should have been done *when the file was changed*.
Or am I missing something here? Because anybody can take any of the
files at an
> To the extent that clang/LLVM and GCC are fighting, which is not
> really the case, then I think it makes sense for GCC to focus on its
> strengths, not its weaknesses. Objective C is not a strength. I'm
> not sure it makes sense for the GCC project to encourage its limited
> volunteer resource
> The *political* aspects are dictating the *technical* aspects.
Perhaps.
> So... like it or not, that makes this list exactly the right place to
> have this discussion.
No because the *people* that decide the political and technical aspects
are different and this list is for the latter, not the
> This has nothing to do with Oracle v. Google, but with GCC policy of not
> requiring a copyright assignment for small patches from the first-time
> contributors (which Paolo knows as a long-time GCC hacker).
I think it's a valid reminder that that policy needs to be interpreted
carefully and
> I believe this should be possible. I believe that Ada has constructs
> like this. I think you will need to use a PLACEHOLDER_EXPR to get the
> right thing to happen.
Yes, that's correct.
> Please link it, I enjoy reading it and it couldn't harm!
I put it up at
http://www.gnat.com/~kenner/gcctut.ppt
It's 173 slides, but was last modified in 2000 and wasn't current then.
It predates tree-ssa and many of the changes in the way that target macros
were handled.
But it does talk a
> I think we need to come out of the "documentation" mindset. No amount of
> conventional documentation is going to help. What we need is a training
> material that included well defined assignments.
I agree. At one point, I had a large tutorial presentation. It's dated
now, since it's before
> The C / C++ sources that transform / match / analyze trees and rtxes are
> plain C. Reading these sources, nothing reminds you of the structure of
> the code that is to be transformed / matched / analyzed. It's all
> hand-coded in C and looks considerably different to a tree or RTL dump.
Wh
> For example, I used to think that it would be a good idea to
> document the tree form(s), but I now realize that the file tree.h is
> exactly what is required.
Indeed. And we do try hard to make sure that the comments are updated
when the contents are. That's why I'm not sure a big fan of thes
> Perhaps it'd be worthwhile to consider making the compiler easier to
> understand, maybe by devoting a lot of effort into the internals
> documentation. There's a lot of knowledge wrapped up in people that
> could disappear with one bus factor.
That is definitely a worthwhile goal, and one that
> I don't think there is a direct relationship, actually. Other, easier
> to maintain compilers, are quite happy without a GC. I do agree,
> however, that a bad memory management system leads to maintainability
> issues. We definitely do not want to fall into the obstack nightmare.
I agree comp
> It's just that an increasing number of mail agents are configured by
> default to send rich-text.
And people who know enough about computing to work on compilers don't know
how to change the default on their MUA? That seems like a poor reason to
make such a change.
> It's not that they *cannot* follow an arbitrary rule. It is that the
> rule bears no relation with the quality of their work, so they see it
> as an artificial roadblock which merely irritates them. Add enough
> irritants and they may decide to take their contributions elsewhere.
Coding standa
> And restricting writers, may result in the loss of contributors in the
> medium/long term.
We have a lot of things we do that "restrict" writers. We insist that
patches be tested. We insist that coding standards be followed. We
insist that good documentation practices be applied. We don't all
> First, C or C++ is not the best language to write a compiler in,
It is my strong opinion that the best language to write a compiler in is
the language that it is compiling (or the primary language in the case
of a multi-language compiler like GCC).
> Yes, the case is that the two pieces can be independent since they can
> be used with third-party programs. The one piece would be GPL-ed tool
> flow and the other piece a kind of "specialized" assembler. I recall
> that many proprietary assemblers did/do exist, e.g. for x86. I think
> we
> Correct. A court of competent jurisdiction can decide whether your scheme
> conforms to the relevant licenses; neither licens...@fsf.org nor the
> people on this list can.
A minor correction: licens...@fsf.org *could* determine that since they are
the copyright holders. If they say it's OK,
> There are not many lawyers in Greece that deal with open-source licenses.
The legal issue here has nothing whatsoever to do with open-source
licenses: the exact same issue comes up with proprietary licenses and
that, in fact, is where most of the precedents come from.
The legal issue is in the
> There are not many lawyers in Greece that deal with open-source licenses.
Then I'd suggest trying in other EU nations. I am not a lawyer, but
I understand that most of the relevant issues are the same throughout
the EU.
> Would these solve my problem?
No, not as long as it's *your* machine.
> > b) write proprietary code, that links in only modules with
> > the standard library exception.
>
> I guess I'm naturally going for b), that was the original intention.
But most of GCC, which you are "linking in" by virtue of a custom
interface, does *not* have the library exception, so you ar
> AFAICS GPL,v3+ restricts my freedom...
If you want to argue that, I'd suggest you not do so on this email list:
it's not going to be well-received.
> I know I have come to a scheme that I will not violate the GPL.
I disagree.
> I have a few questions to make sure that I will not violate the GPL,v3:
If you have a legal question, you should ask an attorney who specializes
in copyright law as it applies to computer software. Do not rely on
anything you get as a response to your question online.
The below is my opinion,
> i don't know if you're trying to be funny...
>
> but what's between the definition of N1 and the undef of A may be a very
> complex. it's just simplified for demonstration.
It's not good programming practice to have a macro (in this case A) have
two different values, with an #undef between then
> given. but do you have a consensus of the community that this
> feature is not worth including? i haven't even heard but from a few
> people saying that "it's not worth it because if it was, 'we're the
> ones to have thought about it'".
No, that's not what people are saying.
It's important to t
> Well I am not sure what you mean by a linter or lint program,
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lint_(software)
VERY early (and simple) static analysis program for C.
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