Date: Fri, 21 Jul 2000 03:49:43 -0400 (EDT)
Message-Id: <200007210749.DAA10672@indy.delorie.com>
From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT delorie DOT com>
To: martin AT loewis DOT home DOT cs DOT tu-berlin DOT de
CC: lauras AT softhome DOT net, mrs AT windriver DOT com, gcc AT gcc DOT gnu DOT org,
        djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com
In-reply-to: <200007201205.OAA15361@loewis.home.cs.tu-berlin.de>
	(martin AT loewis DOT home DOT cs DOT tu-berlin DOT de)
Subject: Re: GCC headers and DJGPP port
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> Date: Thu, 20 Jul 2000 14:05:06 +0200
> From: "Martin v. Loewis" <martin AT loewis DOT home DOT cs DOT tu-berlin DOT de>
> 
> However, I thought you are *maintainers* of the compiler
> (specifically, the DOS port of it).

See, that's the whole point: DJGPP library and the GCC port are
developed and maintained by different people.  There's some overlap,
but we have found it unrealistic to require that the same people
understand all the subtleties of each of these two complex projects
(there are also others: Binutils, GDB, etc.) and closely track the
development of all of them.  We would like to make the individual
ports and the library to be as independent of each other as we can.

This means we need to try to prevent potential problems before they
happen, because we cannot afford frequent releases.  Having many
headers that are developed and tested separately by the GCC team goes
against this.

For example, the headers installed by GCC use various macros to avoid
redefinitions and multiple typedefs.  Using these headers means that
the library developers need to know about all of these special macros,
lest some change in the library breaks them.  Likewise, the GCC port
maintainers need to know about all the subtleties of the library
internals, to prevent changes in GCC headers from breaking the
library.

This is what we are trying to avoid.