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Date:      Fri, 24 Jan 2003 22:34:49 -0800
From:      Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com>
To:        Jeroen Ruigrok/asmodai <asmodai@wxs.nl>
Cc:        JacobRhoden <jrhoden@unimelb.edu.au>, freebsd-chat@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: GCC as a selling point for FreeBSD? (Not!)
Message-ID:  <3E323009.CE3311AE@mindspring.com>
References:  <4.3.2.7.2.20030119130825.00b21ee0@localhost> <4.3.2.7.2.20030119133833.00e422f0@localhost> <200301201620.37863.jrhoden@unimelb.edu.au> <3E2B9C4C.8626D11C@mindspring.com> <20030124071422.GK67360@nexus.ninth-circle.org> <3E30EF41.D4E26A23@mindspring.com> <20030125023959.GO67360@nexus.ninth-circle.org>

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Jeroen Ruigrok/asmodai wrote:
> >> Furthermore, to quiet some other speculation and such on this topic:
> >> TenDRA is BSD Licensed, we're actively working together with some
> >> committers to get gcc-dependencies fixed in the source tree (on another
> >> note, we also periodically test apps:
> >> http://www.tendra.org/~asmodai/compiled-apps.txt).
> >
> >We've heard Brett Glass rail on it long enough that we know the
> >license is acceptable, even if the code generation and optimizer
> >are not really very adequate.
> 
> What part of BSDL was not apparent on the website's frontpage or my text
> above?

The implication that it was my speculation about the license that
you were attempting to forestall.

If you look over my history of postings on the topic of GCC and
getting out from under the GPL in the toolchain, should anyone
want to, when the topic comes up, I *universally* reccomend
TenDRA as the starting point.

> The DERA [Qinetiq] folks were kind enough to explain their Crown
> license is a BSDL-like license and had no objections to use putting it
> under BSDL for the new work.  So, if the BSDL/Crown duality, for now, is
> not acceptable as a license I wonder what would be within the scope of
> the FreeBSD Project.  So I fail to see the relevence of the above
> comment to Brett.

You, not I, brought up the issues of license.  By bringing up the
issue of license in the context of a thread on GCC in which Brett
has participated, you effectively reference Brett.  Just whose
license arguement were you trying to forestall?


> >I think the major issues, as far as "C" is concerned, are the
> >GCC-ism's, like auto array declarations using an index that was
> >a parameter to the function, which still occurs one place in the
> >FreeBSD kernel, and the inability to support "Linker sets", per
> >se, in order to support SYSINIT() type constructs, without the
> >ability to support inline assembly code -- and supporting the
> >inline assembly code, itself.
> 
> Correct, FreeBSD depends heavily on gcc abuses/extensions of the C
> language, such as __attribute__(()), #warning, and so on.

All of which, IMO, are Evil(tm), but which aren't going away,
any more than FreeBSD will ever compile under a compiler like
the Berkeley Portable C compiler (a K&R compiler) as a result
of other non-portable constructs.


> >>From what I was able to see in the published documentation on
> >the site, there is still no support for inline assembly.  I was
> >unable to get an answer, one way or another, whether the code
> >currently supports "long long", or not, either.
> 
> It has supported long long since 4.1.2 which was released in 1998.

As I said, I was unable to get this information from the site; the
FAQ has all of two entries in it.

-- Terry

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