Copying David Daney's response to contrast against it:
GCC is a mature piece of software that works really well and it is in a
programming domain which is not as well understood and for people such
as myself, I would be intimidated from the start, to delve in and expect
any contributions I make to be valuable enough to bother the existing
machine with. :-)
But yes, if I overcame that intimidation, I'm sure David Daney's
comments would describe the *next* barrier to overcome...
Cheers,
mark
On 04/23/2010 03:33 PM, David Daney wrote:
On 04/23/2010 11:39 AM, Manuel López-Ibáñez wrote:
This seems to be the question running around the blogosphere for
several projects. And I would like to ask all people that read this
list but hardly say or do anything.
What reasons keep you from contributing to GCC?
I am going to answer why I think it is, even though I like to think
that I do do something.
GCC has high standards, so anybody attempting to make a contribution
for the first time will likely be requested to go through several
revisions of a patch before it can be accepted.
After having spent considerable effort developing a patch, there can
be a sense that the merit of a patch is somehow related to the amount
of effort expended creating it. Some people don't have a personality
well suited to accepting criticism of something into which they have
put a lot of effort. The result is that in a small number of cases,
people Bad Mouth GCC saying things like: The GCC maintainers are a
clique of elitist idiots that refuse to accept good work from outsiders.
Personally I don't agree with such a view, and I don't think there is
much that can be done about it. There will always be Vocal
Discontents, and trying to accommodate all of them would surly be
determental to GCC.
I think that some potential contributors are discouraged from
contributing because they have been frightened away (by the Vocal
Discontents mentioned above) before they can get started.
David Daney