Hello Scott!
I do know this: Many, many scientific and mathematical programmers find
GCC frustrating and annoying, and most of those folk know far more about
numbers than I do. I wish more of these people would feel comfortable
posting to the GCC list, rather than sending private e-mails to my
inbox.
At this point, I wonder what is wrong with Bugzilla, that those
programmers don't fill a proper bug report. If there is a problem with
GCC, that is so annoying to somebody, I think that at least developers
could be informed about it via their standard channels of communication.
If there is a specific problem, at least it can be analysed properly and
perhaps some actions could be taken to fix it. If the problem is indeed
_that_ big (usually, it is not!), then a workaround could be suggested -
and this bug, together with a workaround is documented in bugzilla for
others, until the problem is properly solved (usually with a testcase).
I guess that these persons don't know that bugreports are extremmely
important for the development of gcc. The users themself are actaully a
QA department of open source development;)
There is no problem that Bugzilla is un-intuitive, it is far from that.
The users don't fill bugreports because they are afraid of filling an
invalid report or a duplicate. I can't speak for gcc bugmasters, but it
looks to me that dupes and invalid reports are not that big problem.
Is perhaps some kind of anonymous account needed (as in Slashdot's case)
to encourage these users to fill bugreports? Their knowledge of specific
problems could help gcc to became better, so it indeed is a win-win
situation.
However, the atmosphere of GCC development is... well, let's just
say that my investment in asbestos underware has not been wasted. ;)
I would call it an atmosphere of brainstorming. Different opinions and
different point of views. The only problem is, that words can be
different if people sit 3000 km/miles/whatever apart ;)
Uros.