Re: Objective-C bugs and GCC releases

[Zack Weinberg]

Alex Perez <address@hidden> writes:

> Mark Mitchell wrote:
>> Gregory John Casamento wrote:
>>> It is my opinion that the policy of allowing ObjC to be broken in
>>> releases of GCC should stop.
>>
>> That's up to the Objective-C maintainers to ensure.  As the RM, I
>> will not hold up an otherwise good release because of Objective-C
>> breakage.
>> 
>
> That's the thing, though...as far as I understand, and please, correct
> me if I am wrong, the GNUstep folk, developers, and community are not
> responsible for this lovely breakage. You're holding GNUstep, a GNU
> project, hostage to an outside corporation, Apple Computer, who surely
> has its own agenda and timetable.

No, see, look.

This bug is only going to get fixed if someone decides to volunteer
their time and effort fixing it.  As it happens, someone did[1], and
so this entire discussion is in some sense moot.  But there's this
persistent misunderstanding that I want to clear up, anyway.

First off, y'all seem to be taking the position that, because a bug
has been taken off the release-critical list, that means it's never
getting fixed.  That's not what it means.  It means, when every bug
that remains on the release-critical list gets fixed, then we're going
to make the 4.0.0 release whether or not that one has been fixed yet.
However, that glorious day is still at least three months in the
future.  If someone volunteers their time and fixes some bug that's
not on the release-critical list between now and then, then that bug
too will be fixed.  In the case of the bug currently under discussion,
as I said above, this has already happened.

Second, but perhaps more important: GCC is a volunteer project just as
GNUstep, Swarm, etc. are volunteer projects.  No one has the authority
to force anyone else to sit down and write code.  Furthermore, no one
has any obligation to sit down and write code themselves.  Zem is the
ObjC maintainer, but all that means is he has the authority to decide
whether patches that have already been written, get applied, when they
affect only the ObjC front end.  It does not mean he has to use that
authority.  It does not mean he has to sit down and fix bugs himself.
He could pack up and move to Patagonia tomorrow and never communicate
with the project again, and he would not be derelict in his
obligations, because he has no obligations.  The same goes for every
other person involved in GCC development.

I appreciate that the GNUstep community has a strong interest in
getting good Objective-C compilers from the GCC community, and that
you feel we have not served you terribly well in this regard.  Well,
the cure for your pain is for you to start participating in GCC
development.  If you don't like what Apple's Objective-C people are
doing (or not doing) with the compiler, send in your own patches.
Keep doing it long enough and you'll probably get appointed
co-maintainers of the front end.

zw

[1] http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2005-01/msg01763.html