2010/6/7 Kenneth Gonsalves <lawgon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
from wikipedia (although it is not an authorative source)
<quote>
As GCC was free software, programmers wanting to work in other directions?
particularly those writing interfaces for languages other than C?were free to
develop their own fork of the compiler. Multiple forks proved inefficient and
unwieldy, however, and the difficulty in getting work accepted by the
official GCC
project was greatly frustrating for many. The FSF kept such close control on
what was added to the official version of GCC 2.x that GCC was used as one
example of the "cathedral" development model in Eric S. Raymond's essay The
Cathedral and the Bazaar.
...
EGCS fork
In 1997, a group of developers formed EGCS (Experimental/Enhanced GNU Compiler
System),[11] to merge several experimental forks into a single project. The
basis of the merger was a GCC development snapshot taken between the 2.7 and
2.81 releases. Projects merged included g77 (Fortran), PGCC (P5 Pentium-
optimized GCC), many C++ improvements, and many new architectures and
operating system variants.[12][13]
EGCS development proved considerably more vigorous than GCC development, so
much so that the FSF officially halted development on their GCC 2.x compiler,
"blessed" EGCS as the official version of GCC and appointed the EGCS project
as
the GCC maintainers in April 1999. Furthermore, the project explicitly adopted
the "bazaar" model over the "cathedral" model. With the release of GCC 2.95 in
July 1999, the two projects were once again united.
</quote>