I think that the key points is people talking past each other. I understand that GCC developers have little time but sometimes I think there is a lack of explanations and patience.

Saying “that is undefined by the standard” or “that is allowed by the standard” does not satisfy users. And most of the time the *real* reasons are far simpler and easier to understand if explained properly. Typically they are that doing otherwise: “will break other people’s code”, “will reduce performance for other people’s code”, “will reduce the performance of gcc” or “will add excessive complexity to gcc”. Or simply, “sorry, we would like to, but we cannot do that yet”.

I don’t think GCC needs someone in charge, a Project Leader. But GCC needs someone that can speak for GCC. Someone that has time to go in private with people (users and developers) and work out what are the real issues, which are the possible solutions and how to find a compromise. Someone that acts as a middle-man between busy GCC devs and users and also sometimes between GCC devs when things go a bit personal (and that has happened in a few occassions) in order to avoid people talking past each other.

So I would say that while the structure of gcc permits the global write maintainers to be in charge, in practice they are not.

The steering committee has evidently decided not to create any new global write maintainers. Perhaps they are concerned about this very issue.

The tone of the recent discussion says to me that the bridges have already been burnt. Kernel developers, at least the vocal ones, have given up on GCC. My concern is that we’re in the process of eroding the trust that other developer communities have. (Speaking of which, I also hear many complaints about C++ — ABI breakages from several years ago still get complaints.)

I agree that the lack of a central maintainer is a problem. It is hard to picture who could fill that role, though, especially given GCC’s history. The abrasive nature of some people on the GCC list partly stems from this problem; although things have been better in recent years, the community would be a bit better off if it required people to temper their tone a bit.

FWIW I don’t really agree that nobody is in charge of GCC. This is what GCC developers say, but in reality the global write maintainers have an enormous say over the direction of the compiler — at least in terms of veto power. I think there are social reasons that this is not openly discussed, but it doesn’t make it less true

I dunno, maybe I’m looking for doom. I’m not as optimistic about GCC as you seem to be, but neither am I overly pessimistic. On the plus side I think GCC is fairly open technically — everybody knows there are problems but there generally isn’t much resistance when someone codes up an improvement. General cleanups are under-invested, but that seems to be an industry-wide phenomenon.

On the minus side I would put certain developers’ email styles, an occasionally unwieldy patch approval process (or, really, too few maintainer), and lack of transparency and change in the SC (though I liked what I heard from the SC at the summit, and this made the committee not seem quite as bad).

You are certainly right that it’s not an obvious win in all cases.

Mark Mitchell isn’t Project Leader, he’s Release Manager. There is no Project Leader. That said, I think Mark probably could speak for gcc if he chose to assert himself. However, he doesn’t. He prefers a more consensus oriented approach, which is the right way to operate within the gcc community but is less helpful when dealing with people who are outside that community. Also Mark is very busy and tends to lag discussions by several days at best, so we see whole discussion firestorms before he has anything to say.

Can’t Mark Mitchell, as Project Leader, speak for Gcc? If it has a future, I’m inclined to give him a lot of the credit for it.