Re:Forking, then maintaining... (Score 1)

The *BSD forked something quite a bit lighter than GCC, namely GAS, in 1993; they implemented a useful feature (dynamic shared libraries, à la SunOS) with it; since the main GAS thread went to ELF and BFD, they had to support themselves their fork; it proved to be too heavy a weight for them, so they were "forced" a few years later to drop the enhancement, or at least making it deprecated/obsolete. So I do not believe forking GCC as being rational, at least for a mainstream projet like *BSD.