malloc: performance improvements and bugfixes

[Manuel López-Ibáñez]

Jörn (and others),

Judging from similar discussions in the GCC list:

https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2010-04/msg00847.html
https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2010-04/msg00725.html

I would strongly advise to stop discussing this here and contact the 
copyright-clerk of the FSF and expose your case: "I want to contribute to GNU 
libc, but I don't want to assign copyright because of X, Y, and Z. What can I do?"

Why?

1) As the thread in GCC shows, almost every contributor to any GNU project 
don't know or are completely wrong about the details. At most, they can tell 
you their personal case, however, the FSF changes their processes with respect 
to legal changes, thus personal experience is of limited value.

2) The process is very individualized. It depends on where you live, where you 
work, how much you want to contribute, etc. Only the FSF clerk (who I guess is 
a lawyer or has access to a lawyer) knows all the fine details.

3) The FSF is very flexible and will try to personalize the process to your 
circumstances and desires. So explain them in detail what are your worries and 
questions. In my first CA, I changed some parts of the document to please my 
university (whose lawyers had to sign it), and the FSF was ok with it.

As I said in that thread, "the process is overly complex, obscure, confusing 
and slow. It does not seem that it needs to be so. It is scaring away potential
contributors and slowing down GCC development." and "It would be
extremely useful if anyone that feels confident on the subject wrote a
FAQ-like document in the wiki that we could use as a reference for the
future."

However, only the FSF can fix this, any discussion here about the what, the how 
or the why is pointless. (Yet, more than 5 years have passed since the above 
discussion and the situation has not improved. I firmly believe that the CA is 
the number one hurdle for contributing to GCC, more than the GPLv3 or the code 
itself.)

Cheers,

	Manuel.