Re: New maintainer

[Karl Fogel]

"John Wiegley" <address@hidden> writes:
>I interpret him as meaning that the support should not favor non-GCC compilers
>in any way, not that GCC should determine the least upper bound on
>functionality.

Just to confirm what others have pointed out:

Given the context and past discussions, I think you would better assume that 
Richard meant "If GCC doesn't *actually* support the feature, then Emacs 
shouldn't add support for that feature just because Clang does."  I think at 
the very least the criterion would be that an actual patch to GCC must exist, 
even if no release of GCC includes it yet.  

That's just a guess though.  It's an open question whether the requirement 
would be that the FSF version (i.e., what we would call the "official" version) 
of GCC must support the feature, or whether it would be sufficient for the 
feature to be supported in a publicly available patch to GCC.  I hope the 
latter, since that's exactly the point at which Emacs's corresponding support 
would no longer be merely "theoretical" with respect to GCC.

> Isn't crippling the output of GCC, to prevent use by proprietary
> vendors, a direct example of limiting *our* freedom, as users who want
> access to that information to improve our use of Emacs (or other
> tools)? Making such information available does not make GCC or Emacs
> in any way more proprietary or freedom-destroying. If anything, it is
> liberating the information known to these applications, so that it can
> be more widely applied.

What one group chooses to do to their copy of a free software program can 
*never* interfere with others' freedom w.r.t. that program, because those 
others are always free to do whatever they want with their own copy.  If the 
FSF chooses not to add a feature to GCC, that doesn't interfere with your 
freedom.  It may interfere with your convenience, but respecting people's 
freedom does not require supplying them exactly the thing they want, it merely 
requires not interfering with their ability to procure what they want by 
whatever means are available to them.

The FSF can't "cripple" GCC.  It can only cripple *its version* of GCC.  You 
and anyone else are free to make a non-crippled version of GCC, and that's what 
freedom means :-).

Best,
-Karl