intel driver will only compile with gcc

[Kean Johnston]

> Why could your favourite platform that wants to install Xorg 7.x not
> also install gcc?
That is so far from the point of this discussion I shouldn't waste
my time explaining it but I will. The point is, X.org used to work
on OSR5. Now it doesn't. Thats a regression. That regression can be
solved by using more portable code, at the expense of some legibility
(and in the case Daniel pointed out a little more care when adding
structure members where you partially initialize them). At a rough
count, it would take about 80 lines of code changed to fix.

Contrast that to introducing an entirely new compiler chain, in which
you not only have to validate the compiler, but also all of the tools
that go along with it (link editor, assembler etc), many of which
require several thousand lines of code changes (especially the binutils
stuff), some of which are very unlikely to ever be accepted back into
the source base. Its about a 6 man-month project to port gcc. Do you
*HONESTLY* mean to suggest that is a more preferable solution?

Also I would like to point out that the reasons Daniel gave in
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/2007-June/025514.html
are not technical reasons as I define them, but mostly stylistic ones.
Phrases like "will definitely beat" lack a certain technical element
to them. The closest that mail comes to providing a *technical*
reason is the very last paragraph, except that even there its only
half true, because if you add structure members to the end, unless
you are also wanting to initialize the new members, you can leave
the existing initializers exactly as they are.

But I give up on this. People would rather defend their position than
make any attempt to help understand the problem. But I tell you now,
the very next time I hear them complaining about the lack of new
developers, you can count of me pointing right back to this thread,
which has become so developer-hostile that I have lost all interest
in working on X.org, as small as my part was.

So long and thanks for all the fish.