Re: [Tinycc-devel] Re: Tinycc-devel Digest, Vol 71, Issue 4

[Rob Landley]

On Sunday 15 March 2009 10:01:25 Joshua Phillips wrote:
> Rob said he's waiting for the CVS repository to be dead. Tcc isn't entirely
> dead.

Merely pining for the fijords.  The project is so healthy that my question 
about the status of the repository a _week_ ago has yet to receive an 
authoritative response.

I got an email on Sunday from a professor with a post-doc who's planning to 
hook my abandoned tinycc fork up to the http://www.cminusminus.org/ backend.  
Basically asking if I would be available to answer questions about it (sure, 
I'm just not going to put much more time into it).  Why use my fork?  He 
explicitly said:

> I have no interest in dealing with the 'official' fork or with
> suffering any more CVS torture.  We are currently using git, have used
> darcs, and probably could be persuaded to try Hg on the grounds that
> it would be good for our educations.

I feel _bad_ about this.  Keep in mind, my fork was publicly abandoned six 
months ago, and I'm still getting email about it.  These two are planning to 
dive in and refactor the code so it talks to a code generation backend through 
a documented interface.  That's really cool!  That's what we need to hook up 
TCG from QEMU, and suddenly have support for arm, cris, i386, m68k (well, 
coldfire), mips, mips64, ppc, ppc64, sh4, sparc, and x86-64.  Plus several 
different variants of each one (For example, arm supports armv4, armv5, armv6, 
armv7, each both little and big endian).  If they do nothing but _document_ 
the existing interface, that's a big plus.

It would make _sense_ for knowledgeable, energetic people like that to be able 
to use the "official" version and contribute back to it.  I myself could turn 
tcc into a swiss army knife executable (ala busybox, which I maintained for a 
year and a half) over a weekend, the way I mentioned in my previous message to 
this list.  There's work this project desperately needs, and has needed for 
years now, which isn't getting done.

But the "official" version is CVS, and having to work with CVS is like having 
to do development under DOS.  It was already a bad idea in the 1990's, now 
it's just crazy.

I am not the only person driven away from this project by the boat anchor of 
CVS around its neck, but until CVS stops being the official repository that 
releases will be cut from (and at this point I won't trust that zombie's dead 
until that respository GOES AWAY), tcc is dead to me.

Rob