Re: Emacs contributions, C and Lisp

[David Engster <deng@randomsample.de>]

Eric Ludlam writes:
> On 01/09/2015 10:09 AM, David Engster wrote:
>> Richard Stallman writes:
>>> You and several others are trying to pressure me to decide to make
>>> GCC output the full AST.  I have seen insults and harassment.
>
>>
>> Not from me, and I haven't seen anything like it on this thread.
>>
>>> This is not the way to convince me.  It is the way to make me resent
>>> your behavior.
>>
>> I've no idea what I've done to earn your resentment. I think my behavior
>> was entirely reasonable, given that I've started with this only because
>> you asked to base our tooling efforts on GCC. Anyway, you don't have to
>> worry that I'll continue with this.
>
> This conversation seems unnecessarily final.

I'm afraid it is final for me. Maybe someone else will step up.

> Richard has valid concerns that need details, but since the AST (which
> I know almost nothing about) is so huge (based on parser's I've
> written), no matter how many details we may think of that are needed,
> someone else can think of a bit that could indeed be unnecessary.

I'm not willing to work under some elaborate rule set what I may and may
not do with the AST. It is way too easy to make a mistake, and a few
years ago I've learned the hard way that there's no such thing as an
"honest mistake" when it comes to software's freedom. Also, what happens
if someone else takes my code and simply rewrites it to dump everything?
It would be trivial, since the real work is walking the AST and
extracting its information. The only solution for defending against this
is to restrict access to the AST in GCC's plugin interface, rendering my
plugin unusable. Also, I seem to be unable to discuss with Richard
without him calling out my behavior, so I'm clearly not the right person
for this job.

-David