Matthias wrote:
If it generates working code for the all the supported architectures and supports the relevent C standards that is probably good enough.
That's a chance no major evolution is in line of sight currently. But suppose that, for example, GCC would have gone GPL3 before supporting amd64 arch.
Why is this a problem? The Core 2 processors are probably the fastest CPUs NetBSD currently runs on. I don't think that CPU specific optimization which makes code run another 5% faster on this kind of hardware is an important criteria for the compiler provided by the base system.
You mostly right in 99,99 % of the cases. Yet, there are out there big servers running thousands of simultaneous tasks serving zillions of users and those care even for 0.1 % increase in overall performance. People have spent much time optimizing out a lot of things in the kernel to make NetBSD outstanding, it would be just bummer to have to those efforts cancelled out just because some other OS with a state-of-the-art GCC achieve the same performance.
Christos, if I take your position as an official board statement, this means the GPL3 quarantine is over, and you've decided to go ahead?
Vincent