Re: Objective-C bugs and GCC releases

[Joe Buck]

On Tue, Jan 25, 2005 at 05:54:44PM -0500, Patrick McFarland wrote:
> Mark Mitchell wrote:
> >I would indeed hold up the release because of C++ breakage.  C++ is a 
> >release-critical language; Objective-C is not.  That's very much 
> >analagous to the fact that IA32 GNU/Linux is a release-critical 
> >platform; other systems like SH ELF are not.
> 
> How is Objective-C not a release-critical language?
> 
> 1) Quite a few people use it
> 2) GCC is the only useful ObjC compiler out there
> 3) Apple would rather not deal with GCC dev fucktardism
> 4) Gnustep would rather not deal with GCC dev fucktardism

This list is a vehicle for the gcc developers to communicate with each
other, not for calling gcc developers insulting and obscene names.
Please stop.  If you don't, even if you aren't banned, people will just
stop reading your mail.  Trying to bludgeon people into changing their
minds by accusing them of "fucktardism" will backfire.

> But GCC isn't a commercial venture. It is an open source project. 

Well, actually it is a free software project.  Nevertheless advocates of
open source are fond of saying "release early, release often", and you
want us to release late.

> We 
> (the open source community) don't have deadlines, we don't need to worry 
> about making money. All we need to do is worry that our software isn't 
> the absolute best that we can produce.

If we do what Mark's planning on, and all goes well, then we can expect a
branch to be created very soon and a release in some small number of
months.  My guess is that there would *still* be three months from now to
fix Objective-C bugs.  If and only if the Objective-C developers can't fix
them by then would 4.0.0 have broken Objective-C.

If that's not enough time for you, then how does it serve the world to
deny everyone the new C and C++ compilers?

> And if GCC ships with broken Objective-C, it is not the absolute best.

That's what point releases are for.  Fix it in 4.0.1.

In any case, why would you expect software with a "0.0" at the end of the
name to be perfect?  Have you no experience at all?  After the release,
it's going to take some time to stabilize.  In the meantime, no one is
taking older gcc releases away from you.