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Re: Disassembly of arrayForth

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Andrew Haley wrote:

> Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> wrote:
> 
>> It's not entirely fair, as RedHat doesn't do the big part of
>> maintaining all these packages; they do the little part of
>> maintaining them within their distribution.
> 
> That misrepresents what we do, really.  We don't maintain everything,
> or even the majority of programs in a GNU/Linux system, but we do
> maintain a lot of stuff.  A lot of GCC is ours, and GDB, and a fair
> bit of the kernel work.  And I'm porting OpenJDK.  There are lots of
> other things.  I think we spend more time working on upstream programs
> than we do customizing packages for our own distro.  I'm pretty
> confident we give more than we take, but of course it's impossible to
> prove that.

The whole point of free software is that everybody takes way more than they 
give.  That's how it works, because taking is much easier than giving - 
giving means developing software, taking just means deploying software.

The question whether you give more than you take is much more complicated.  
One problem e.g. with GCC is that the GCC code base is IMHO pretty bad.  
I've done some GCC patches in the past to a particular port (Sharc DSP), and 
tried to figure out if I could patch some other problems like the computed 
goto stuff.  My explanation of why GCC is such a mess is that Cygnus came up 
with the business modell of GCC maintenance, and to keep competition out, 
they obfuscated GCC, so a good deal of the knowledge how to maintain GCC is 
now outside of the sourcecode, but within the Cygnus team, which is now part 
of RedHat.  I'm not quite sure if it was like that, because during the 
Cygnus days, most of the work was done at Cygnus, but the maintenance leader 
was Richard Kenner, who didn't work for Cygnus.  That might have caused too 
many frictions.  However, the last Kenner GCC (2.95.2) is still the best 
compiler for Gforth on x86.  Quality went way down with the EGCS series.

In contrast, I also did write some Linux kernel drivers, for another Analog 
Device processor, the Blackfin (the GCC port to Blackfin was good enough so 
that I didn't need to patch it, but the Linux kernel was missing an audio 
driver for the sound port).  This code base is much better organized, and I 
think it's that way, because in the Linux kernel, nobody tried to monopolize 
maintenance.  There are ugly parts in the Linux code base, but in general, 
the code is easy to jump onto and adapt it for your needs.

IMHO it's a bad idea if one company maintains a core part of the free 
software world, and GCC is indeed a core part.  This is not the Forth world, 
where a compiler can be maintained by just one person.

-- 
Bernd Paysan
"If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself"
http://bernd-paysan.de/

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Re: Disassembly of arrayForth Dennis Ruffer <daruffer@gmail.com> - 2013-06-20 21:47 -0700
  Re: Disassembly of arrayForth albert@spenarnc.xs4all.nl (Albert van der Horst) - 2013-06-21 14:34 +0000
    Re: Disassembly of arrayForth Luca Saiu <positron@gnu.org> - 2013-06-25 12:01 +0200
      Re: Disassembly of arrayForth Mark Wills <markrobertwills@yahoo.co.uk> - 2013-06-25 03:32 -0700
        Re: Disassembly of arrayForth Luca Saiu <positron@gnu.org> - 2013-06-25 12:37 +0200
          Re: Disassembly of arrayForth Mark Wills <markrobertwills@yahoo.co.uk> - 2013-06-25 05:01 -0700
            Re: Disassembly of arrayForth Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2013-06-25 15:16 +0200
              Re: Disassembly of arrayForth anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2013-06-25 14:06 +0000
              Re: Disassembly of arrayForth "Ed" <invalid@invalid.com> - 2013-06-26 15:58 +1000
                Re: Disassembly of arrayForth Andrew Haley <andrew29@littlepinkcloud.invalid> - 2013-06-26 03:25 -0500
                Re: Disassembly of arrayForth Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2013-06-27 15:56 +0200
            Re: Disassembly of arrayForth Luca Saiu <positron@gnu.org> - 2013-06-25 17:05 +0200
              Re: Disassembly of arrayForth Luca Saiu <positron@gnu.org> - 2013-06-25 17:07 +0200
              Re: Disassembly of arrayForth Mark Wills <markrobertwills@yahoo.co.uk> - 2013-06-25 10:00 -0700
                Re: Disassembly of arrayForth Luca Saiu <positron@gnu.org> - 2013-06-25 21:08 +0200
                Re: Disassembly of arrayForth hughaguilar96@yahoo.com - 2013-08-10 11:43 -0700
                Re: Disassembly of arrayForth "Alex McDonald" <blog@rivadpm.com> - 2013-08-10 21:17 +0100
                Re: Disassembly of arrayForth Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2013-08-10 23:23 +0200
                Re: Disassembly of arrayForth Andrew Haley <andrew29@littlepinkcloud.invalid> - 2013-08-11 02:13 -0500
                Re: Disassembly of arrayForth Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2013-08-11 20:40 +0200
                Re: Disassembly of arrayForth Andrew Haley <andrew29@littlepinkcloud.invalid> - 2013-08-11 17:14 -0500
                Re: Disassembly of arrayForth anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2013-08-12 13:52 +0000
                Re: Disassembly of arrayForth hughaguilar96@yahoo.com - 2013-08-11 23:58 -0700
                Re: Disassembly of arrayForth Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2013-08-12 15:27 +0200
                Re: Disassembly of arrayForth Alex McDonald <blog@rivadpm.com> - 2013-08-12 06:41 -0700
                Re: Disassembly of arrayForth Mark Wills <markrobertwills@yahoo.co.uk> - 2013-08-13 00:36 -0700
                Re: Disassembly of arrayForth Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2013-08-13 23:44 +0200
                Re: Disassembly of arrayForth "Alex McDonald" <blog@rivadpm.com> - 2013-08-13 23:40 +0100
                Re: Disassembly of arrayForth hughaguilar96@yahoo.com - 2013-08-13 21:58 -0700
        Re: Disassembly of arrayForth anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2013-06-25 12:59 +0000
      Re: Disassembly of arrayForth albert@spenarnc.xs4all.nl (Albert van der Horst) - 2013-06-28 01:54 +0000
        Re: Disassembly of arrayForth Mark Wills <markrobertwills@yahoo.co.uk> - 2013-06-28 00:37 -0700
          Re: Disassembly of arrayForth Andrew Haley <andrew29@littlepinkcloud.invalid> - 2013-06-28 02:53 -0500
            Re: Disassembly of arrayForth Mark Wills <markrobertwills@yahoo.co.uk> - 2013-06-28 01:34 -0700
              Re: Disassembly of arrayForth Andrew Haley <andrew29@littlepinkcloud.invalid> - 2013-06-28 04:27 -0500
        Re: Disassembly of arrayForth anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2013-06-28 15:16 +0000
          Re: Disassembly of arrayForth anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2013-06-28 15:43 +0000
            Re: Disassembly of arrayForth Dennis Ruffer <daruffer@gmail.com> - 2013-08-08 20:12 -0700
              Re: Disassembly of arrayForth albert@spenarnc.xs4all.nl (Albert van der Horst) - 2013-08-09 17:19 +0000
                Re: Disassembly of arrayForth Dennis Ruffer <daruffer@gmail.com> - 2013-08-09 18:19 -0700
                Re: Disassembly of arrayForth "Alex McDonald" <blog@rivadpm.com> - 2013-08-10 21:45 +0100
    Re: Disassembly of arrayForth hughaguilar96@yahoo.com - 2013-08-10 11:52 -0700
      Re: Disassembly of arrayForth albert@spenarnc.xs4all.nl (Albert van der Horst) - 2013-08-10 19:10 +0000
      Re: Disassembly of arrayForth "Alex McDonald" <blog@rivadpm.com> - 2013-08-10 21:34 +0100
        Re: Disassembly of arrayForth hughaguilar96@yahoo.com - 2013-08-11 23:17 -0700
          Re: Disassembly of arrayForth "Alex McDonald" <blog@rivadpm.com> - 2013-08-12 12:15 +0100
          Re: Disassembly of arrayForth "Alex McDonald" <blog@rivadpm.com> - 2013-08-12 16:34 +0100

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