Stimulated by the discussion about fixing bugs and frustrated potential developers, I thought it could be useful to briefly share my recent experience of frustrated bug reporter with the subscribers of this list.
Until the recent past, I have never given up investigating any suspicious behavior of GCC and I have always tried hard to come up with a testcase, check the standard documents and write decent bug reports. But this activity has recently been so frustrating that I now see it as a loss of time. In the past, we had the list of open bug reports that was growing beyond control; to improve the situation now we have people sitting on the bug database on a 24/7 basis, with an apparent anxiety to close bug reports as quickly as possible. The pattern I went through lately goes more or less as follows: 1) I submit a bug report; 2) someone looks at it superficially, too superficially, and posts a comment that tends to deny there is a problem; 3) I and/or someone else explain that the problem is indeed there, possibly citing the points of the standards that are being violated; 4) the person who said the bug was not (exactly) a bug does not even care to reply, but the superficial comments remain there, probably killing the bug report. I wonder what is the rationale here. Discouraging bug reporters may be an effective way to avoid bug reports pile up, but this is certainly not good for GCC. Examples of the pattern I described above are in: http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=21067 http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=21032 http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=19092 http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=12963 My advice to people filtering bug reports is: if you only had time to look at the issue superficially, either do not post any comment or be prepared to continue the discussion on more serious grounds if the reporter or someone else comes back by offering more insight and/or precise clauses of the relevant standards. All the best, Roberto -- Prof. Roberto Bagnara Computer Science Group Department of Mathematics, University of Parma, Italy http://www.cs.unipr.it/~bagnara/ mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
