[Tinycc-devel] Healing the fork

[David A. Wheeler]

Here's a proposal for healing the fork; comments?

Rob Landley's been doing some stellar work with tinycc on his fork, but he 
loathes CVS and likes Mercurial.  Fabrice Bellard would like to continue to use 
CVS and have tcc's code hosted on Savannah (which is backed up, and people 
currently pull from it).  I've been creating a number of patches, and I want to 
have a _single_ "official" tcc line because forks are a big pain (they divide 
effort!). I suspect others have the same hope of a single maintained codebase.

So I've asked Fabrice Bellard for permission to update the tcc CVS repository 
on Savannah, and he's agreed (crazy man!). Here's my current idea:
* Wait for Landley's fork to merge in all the capabilities of the current CVS 
repository (e.g., "-E").  I believe Rob Landley is working on that, and 
hopefully that will be done "soon".
* Apply a change to the CVS repository to resync Landley's fork and CVS (to 
their common root), and then apply each of Landley's changesets (I'll write a 
script to do that).  That will mean that the CVS repository will end up with a 
duplicate of Landley's fork, including as much of its history that CVS can 
manage.

After that, for as long as Rob Landley is willing to maintain his fork, I 
intend to quickly look at each change in his fork and reapply it to CVS unless 
it's completely insane.  Conversely, I'll ask everyone (including me) to submit 
patches to Rob Landley _first_.  Frankly, I suggest posting each patch to the 
mailing list, so everyone can kibitz.  Fabrice obviously need not submit 
changes to Rob Landley, though there might be merits in doing so (that's his 
decision!).  This process will mean patches will get lots of review, and it'll 
mean that the code is stored in Savannah (which gets backups, is already used 
by distributors to extract code, etc.).

Landley's fork now includes a host of fixes, including 8 from me. I think the 
following to-do items are especially important:
* alloca() support for x86 (I posted a start towards that)
* Run on current Ubuntu (this involves visibility issues)
* Merge Fabrice Bellard's latest changes into Landley's fork (e.g., "-E") as 
appropriate
* Fix stringify (there's already a post with patch that is believed to do this).

Once those to-do items are done, I think we should talk about testing and 
releasing.  Rob Landley just made a release, but a lot will have happened since 
then!

Comments welcome.  Does this make sense?

--- David A. Wheeler