From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: craig@jcb-sc.com To: zack@rabi.columbia.edu Cc: craig@jcb-sc.com Subject: Re: egcs-1.2 stuff Date: Fri, 30 Apr 1999 23:15:00 -0000 Message-ID: <19990413113230.4670.qmail@deer> References: <199904130225.WAA22238@blastula.phys.columbia.edu> X-SW-Source: 1999-04n/msg00450.html Message-ID: <19990430231500.LHOThzNen9Z_HUSsJVvyntIS1ViaGAsrta-FVhqreME@z> >Now HJ, do you suppose you could've told Craig that yourself, months >ago, and saved us all the trouble? As you've now seen, he did, long ago, in one of the earlier discussions. Problem was, we never did have a bug report (meeting the usual definition of the term), e.g. output from a compile session showing what went wrong, and I didn't, myself, want to just blindly apply a patch that Dave Love was hesitant about (IIRC, he thought there'd been some reason to use ' instead of " earlier), without confirmation of its appropriateness from at least one other person. Now we have that confirmation. BTW, I've written elsewhere about how I prioritize my g77 work. Since nobody pays me to do it, that also means there's nobody I can go to (at the moment) to get marching instructions regarding what to do next. So, I often use the effort, and quality, a person puts into submitting a bug report and/or patch, as a fairly substantial weight in my decision- making process. I also use repetition of what I call "whines", as in getting several emails from one person asking "why won't you fix X" but no useful response when I ask "could you submit a proper bug report" -- but I use this as a *negative* weight, meaning, the more whining I get about a problem, the less important I consider it, mainly because I don't want to encourage that behavior in others. But there's another reason as well. Recent g77 "whines" included no support for AUTOMATIC and giving an error instead of a warning for READONLY. After (increasingly pointedly) asking for more substantial info about both, I finally got some pretty good info (in private email) about AUTOMATIC from the person that wanted it. So support for AUTOMATIC went up on my priority list. (Who knows when it'll be implemented, but still, at least I now have some clue about what it's supposed to do.) I got a *little* bit more info on READONLY, but ended up having to do the research myself anyway, and discovered that, if I'd just blindly done what I was asked, the result would have been that g77 would have become perfectly capable of compiling a program that, when run, *deleted a file* that it wasn't supposed to! (I'll be adding to the g77 docs about this, as well as AUTOMATIC, after finishing up my current megapatch.) So it's not just that I don't *like* whining. (I like it fine when *I* do it...okay, that's an exaggeration. :) It's that, in my experience, people who just whine, rather than say "here's what I need, here's what I've learned about how it might affect *others*, here's how badly I need it, here's how I'm working around it for now", are less likely to have cared enough to *research* the problem -- meaning they effectively want me to not only *implement* their favorite feature, they want me to do all the up-front research on whether it'll break things for others *myself*. So the quoting patch from HJ, while I'm now assuming won't hurt anyone else, *was* being treated by me as if it would, pending at least one other person, in this case a known contributor to egcs, speaking up. (That was all that was needed, because it was such a trivial "fix" to apply, assuming it wasn't going to risk making an entire snapshot useless for g77. So I'm not saying all I need is one other person saying "make g77 ignore READONLY" to get me to commit *that* fix, since I now know doing so would be a bug.) tq vm, (burley)