John L. Ries wrote:
If it is ongoing or deemed to be worth reviving, what can we non-de= velopers do to help (leaving open the possibility that some of us may need = to become developers)?
Using old versions of gcc is probably as close as one can get to minimize ongoing work. But of course there are problems due to changing environment. And there is need to fix bugs. Now, in this area first step is to realize that there is a problem. So when gpc does not build or you see a bug report it. See for example
www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html
on how to do this. If problems with building gpc are due to changes in operating system you can report problems to developers of said systems -- while it is unlikely that they withdraw breaking changes they may offer some workarounds.
Freqently, fixes can be found on the net. For example, as I wrote in another message older gcc-s does not build on current Debian stable. But in Debian repository there is package for gcc-3.3 and it contains 'multiarch-include.dpatch' which solves main problem. This patch does not apply to gcc-3.4.6, but can be easily adapted -- one just have to notice that part of patched code moved from one file to another (both files are appear in the patch). There is another problem, but in this case Gogle gives workaround: set LIBRARY_PATH enviroment varibale to /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu (with x86_64-linux-gnu replaced by appropriate architecture).
Fixes like this take time, but do not require deep familarity with gpc. In fact, the main thing was that I knew that almost all "gpc" build problems are in fact gcc build problems so I looked for workarouds for gcc.