On 4/14/2021 6:08 AM, Richard Biener via Gcc wrote:
On April 14, 2021 12:19:16 PM GMT+02:00, Jonathan Wakely via Gcc
<gcc@gcc.gnu.org> wrote:
N.B. Jeff is no longer @redhat.com so I've changed the CC
On Wed, 14 Apr 2021 at 11:03, Thomas Koenig <tkoe...@netcologne.de>
wrote:
- All gfortran developers move to the new branch. This will not
happen, I can guarantee you that.
This is the part I'm curious about (the rest is obvious, it follows
>from there being finite resources and the nature of any fork). But I'm
not going to press for reasons.
Note the only viable fork will be on the current hosting (which isn't FSF controlled)
with the downside of eventually losing the gcc.gnu.org DNS and thus a need to
"switch" to a sourceware.org name.
I strongly suspect you're right here. Ultimately if one fork reaches
critical mass, then it survives and the other dies. That's a function
of the developer community. Right now I don't see the nightmare
scenario of both forks being viable playing out -- however I'm more
concerned now than I was before due Thomas's comments.
Given there would be actual work involved on the FSF side to keep a "fork" with
the exact same setup (and thus transparent with existing setups) I don't see it keeping
live (but I see somebody populating savannah with sources).
Absolutely. I could even see a small community continuing to push the
FSF fork for a while until it becomes abundantly clear that only one
fork is long term viable. That's what happened with EGCS -- the
majority of the developer community went with the EGCS fork with a small
community staying on the FSF fork. Eventually it became clear that EGCS
had much broader developer support and the FSF fork ultimately withered
away.
Jeff
