Re: Drop the K&R requirement from binutils?

[Andrew Cagney <ac131313 at ges dot redhat dot com>]

> > Is it reasonable to delay BINUTILS conversion when it serves no useful 
> > purpose other than to pacify a very small but very vocal minority of GCC 
[minority within the GCC development community]

> > developers?
>
> GCC and Binutils have a long tradition of supporting platforms that
> have people behind them.  The "small vocal minority" of developers put
> the effort in to maintain support.  The rest of us understand (1) the
> importance of providing free tools on those platforms, and (2) the
> desire to let the people willing to do the work affect the direction
> the work goes in.
Yes.

> GDB, for instance, gave up waiting three years ago.
>
>
> GDB is not needed to bootstrap a development environment.
GDB was a trial to determine what would happen if a development tool 
switched to ISO C.   And what happened?  Nothing.

Here is very strong evidence that that anyone wanting to build a current 
tool is managing to find a way of doing it.  Cross compile, download a 
compiler (as with solaris, windows, hpux, ...), use an unbundled 
compiler, or even use automake's K&R to ISO converter.  Hmm, wasn't all 
this pointed out on the GDB list three years ago?

enjoy,
Andrew