> Maintenance mode != dropped. dropped is it's not in the releases.

Not, but when a program comes to maintenance mode without being a
good product there are some problems.  An example of exceptional
software in maintenance mode is nmh (that currently does not include
new features).  We can say that MH is in maintenance mode since
the first 80's!

> So far, we have that g77 is not a good fortran compiler, and not many
> folks need fortran.

Those folks most time buy commercial products...  :-(

> And now for one big reason to keep it in the base system: we are not
> running stock GCC. We have a number of patches to our code to get it
> working on all of the different CPUs we support. While we are trying to
> (and lately doing a good job of) getting these changes back to GCC
> development, we haven't in the past. Also, fixes in NetBSD-current go into
> GCC-current, which is still in a great state of flux. So to get a stable
> compiler that works well on NetBSD, you need to use what's in our tree.
> 
> So to split g77 out, we would need to make a package of OUR g77, and
> release it. That's a lot of extra work. Just keeping it in the base system
> makes it much easier to maintain.

If splitting GCC in gcc/g++ and g77 is a hard work, I understand that
it will continue as is.  I did not supposed that changes affected in
that way the complete suite.  I suppose that all the problems related
with the toolchain were sourced in building the kernel in a reliable
way; briefly, that were not related with end-user applications.  In
that case, building a second compiler suite (GCC 3.x) looks like an
error for all users.

> While that might have been a reason to not add it, we have added it.
> People see value in having it. Perhaps only a small amount of value, but
> it's there. If g77 were perceived to have negative net value, we'd remove
> it. I don't think you've convinced us it's at negative value yet, though.

Ok, I understand this point.

> The difference is that you're talking about dropping g77 and keeping the
> rest of our compiler suite, when we think of g77 as tightly-bound with the
> others. It would be more like having some of KDE in the base, and the
> less-commonally-used parts in pkgsrc.

I am talking about keeping the C and C++ compilers only.

> > That means that Java, and others compilers that are now being added
> > to GCC 3.x *will be* in the NetBSD base system if the GNU Compiler
> > Collection is upgraded?
> 
> Probably. But that's more Jason's call.

I hope that Java and Ada will not be in the base system!

Looks like an error providing a Java compiler in the base system.  :-(

Thanks for that detailed explanation,
Igor.

-- 
Igor Sobrado, UK34436 - sobrado@acm.org