On Fri, Sep 05, 2008 at 08:11:34AM +1000, Brendon Costa wrote: > Every now and then I poke my head into this list to see if there is any > more progress on the GCC Plugin branch issue. In particular I don't want > to give up on this feature as it will be enormously useful for my open > source project EDoc++. > > In the past, we have had a lot of discussion about the feature, but the > end result has been that RMS is opposed to it so nothing will be done > about it because he has the power.
Some progress has been made on that issue, the idea is to use some new legal language to give the FSF the assurance that it needs. Roughly, the GPL exception for the use of the runtime support libraries wouldn't apply for those who use proprietary plugins to generate the code. The first draft of the legal language to do this job had some major problems, but now there's a new draft. Anything that has lawyers involved takes a while, but I do think it's going to work out. > Preferably, I wish we could convince RMS that this is a good move > forward. Barring that the only solution I can think of is to create a > "fork" of GCC. Where for every GCC release, I provide a patched release > with plugin support. The issue then would be getting the various distros > to use the plugin variant rather than the "official" one (Which could be > quite difficult). RMS has already been convinced, and now the holdup is to complete the legalities and run it by the interested parties. Please be patient for a while longer. Design work can certainly proceed. Only those who want to license their plugin code in a way that is incompatible with GPLv3 are going to need to fork. The wiki page could use some work, but I'm hesitant to add anything that looks like a promise at this point.
