Re: Possible GCC contamination of Linux

Nix (nix-kernel@esperi.demon.co.uk)
14 Oct 1999 22:27:42 +0100


Matthew Wilcox <Matthew.Wilcox@genedata.com> writes:

> ``In April 1999, the egcs steering committee was appointed by the FSF as
> the official GNU maintainer for GCC.''

Yes, exactly. i.e. what would have been egcs-1.2 has become gcc-2.95.1,
and the old gcc-2.8.x tree is dead.

> September 3, 1999
> Long time GCC contributors Mark Mitchell and Richard Kenner
> have been given global write permissions. They are authorized
> to install and approve patches to any part of the compiler.
> Richard Kenner will initially be working on merging in the
> remaining changes from the old GCC 2 sources.
>
> If my memory serves me, egcs is based on a gcc 2 snapshot from about
> 9 months ago.

Depends what you mean by `based'. egcs was forked from gcc a *long* time
before that. From gcc/ChangeLog.0:

Sun Aug 10 12:00:20 1997 Jeffrey A Law (law@cygnus.com)

* egcs project officially starts.

gcc/FSFChangeLog indicates that changes to gcc between that date and Wed
Jan 7 17:09:28 1998 have been merged into what is now gcc-2.95.

The changes that have been made to gcc-2.8 since then have not been
merged in their entirety. *That* is what's still being done (and Richard
Kenner's a damned good person to do it; after all, he did a lot of them.
(Plus, many of those changes to gcc-2.8.x were merges from egcs anyway.)

> The observations are correct though, the generated code is superior and
> it has a different set of bugs.

;) indeed. I like to think a smaller set.

-- 
`I'm glad you want me to be happy. I'd like you to be happy too.'
            --- Nat Lanza, while flaming Larry McVoy on linux-kernel

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