Re: New maintainer

[David Kastrup]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <address@hidden> writes:

> John Wiegley writes:
>
>  > I'm beginning to think GNU Emacs will need someone who also cares
>  > about the freedom argument first, and the technical needs second,
>  > because I'm very much concerned I would chomping at the bit to move
>  > forward, and unable to for reasons I don't necessarily agree with.
>
> I wouldn't worry about that if I were you.  The principle itself
> bothers me a heck of a lot more than the exercise of it does.
>
> In the twenty years I've been following Emacs development, I can
> remember only four occasions where Richard has deliberately sacrificed
> significant improvements to Emacs in the name of promoting either
> software freedom or the GNU Project: TRAMP, Bazaar, DSOs, and now use
> of the AST exported by LLVM.
>
> Of course, the TRAMP mistake has long since been corrected, and the
> Bazaar fiasco is a thing of the past.  The no-DSO policy has been
> rescinded recently, and work is actively proceeding on adding that
> feature.  LLVM?  "This, too, will pass."

To put more precision to it: usually the point of time where the
strategy changes is when it has become pointless.  Since LLVM already
outputs annotated syntax trees, blocking GCC from that kind of
interoperation is not going to achieve a useful purpose for the GNU
project at the current point of time.

So I don't expect that restriction to stick around for all that much
longer in the current form: after all, we don't have anything to gain
from people putting LLVM into their applications rather than GCC even if
we had preferred such applications to fall under the GPL because of
tight integration with GCC.

-- 
David Kastrup