Re: Team Collaboration Considerations

[Paul Richard Thomas <paul.richard.thomas@gmail.com>]

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Hi Jerry and everybody else,

I am with Tobias on this. Between work, gfortran, RSPCA, club and
neighbourhood activities I am "channelled" up to the eyeballs. Adding
another wouldn't make any great odds but I couldn't pay much more attention
to it than many of the others - sorry!

At the present, I am spending more time than I really have on finishing the
finalization patch(es). Hopefully it will see the light of day very soon.
After that, I have to fix the mess that I made of PDTs. Neither of these
feature very high on the scale of the user survey that Steve Lionel ran
but, at least, we could come close to F2003 compliance. It would help
enormously, if somebody would sit down and figure out in detail where the
F2008/2018 gaps are. I am about to vote on the F2023 DAS so if anybody has
any thoughts on that, I would like to hear them. I hate conditional
arguments but the rest looks OK and, I suspect, is relatively easily
implemented.

One really helpful collaborative activity would be to update the gfortran
wiki. For a good long while that, together with the gfortran list, did
serve as our collaborative focus.

Regards

Paul


On Fri, 9 Dec 2022 at 19:36, Toon Moene <toon@moene.org> wrote:

> On 12/8/22 20:14, Holcomb, Katherine A (kah3f) via Fortran wrote:
>
> > I was thinking I might try to contribute when I retire, though that may
> be in a year or two.  But it's been a very long time since I dove into a
> large software project and it's intimidating.  I do know C (really C++, I
> haven't used plain C for a long time).   I am one of those "aging" types
> but I am familiar at least superficially with newer tools because I must
> use them for work, specifically git and Slack (Mattermost seems to be an
> open-source Slack alternative) -- we make heavy use of Slack in particular.
> >
> > Is there some kind of "getting started" guide?
>
> Thanks, Katherine, for your thoughts on this side of support (i.e.,
> fixing compiler bugs, and how to get people interested in contributing).
>
> Based on that, I thought of another approach, namely: interesting
> *users* of gfortran to provide us with useful information on their
> experiences with it (lest we only look at the depressing list of PRs).
>
> Would it help if we created a fortran-help@gcc.gnu.org list (a loose
> parallel of gcc-help@gcc.gnu.org) for *questions* from our user base ?
>
> I just have to look at the questions I get at work from my colleagues:
>
> 1. I get this message while compiling XYZ weather forecasting model
>     (HELP, what does it mean ?). How do I solve it ? Do I need ABC
>     (mega-corporation chip manufacturing's) fortran compiler ?
>
> 2. gfortran gives me a "internal compiler error", but this code
>     compiled perfectly just a year ago (an ICE is never a user's
>     problem). How can I work around it ?
>
> 3. Is this (source code provided) code conformant ? gfortran
>     complains about it, but XYZ compiler just compiles it fine.
>
> etc.
>
> This might not result in many new contributors, but it shows to the
> broader GCC development community what gfortran is used for, and how
> *we* deal with their questions and problems (and, thus, how important
> this part of the GNU Compiler *Collection* is).
>
> Oh, BTW, I retire in nine months, which would give me loads of time to
> deal with such a mailing list.
>
> Kind regards,
>
> --
> Toon Moene - e-mail: toon@moene.org - phone: +31 346 214290
> Saturnushof 14, 3738 XG  Maartensdijk, The Netherlands
>
>

-- 
"If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough" -
Albert Einstein