Re: Some bug policies [Was: Bug Digest 5/24]

[Wolfgang Bangerth <bangerth at ices dot utexas dot edu>]

> discussed is lost until it's filed to Bugzilla. And besides, we are not
> asking users to post their bugs in gcc-bugs.

Actually we are, see
  http://gcc.gnu.org/bugs.html#where
I wanted to remove that (and instead only point to bugzilla), but given 
the resistence to get rid of the gccbug script, I felt that would not go 
through.


> Patches should be posted to gcc-patches, and then the message linked from
> within the bug.

Unfortunately, the reality is that patches by people who's name is not 
known on gcc-patches are largely ignored. Given this, chances for patch 
review are higher if patches are posted to the bug database, and one of us 
forwards it to the person who changed the code in question last, or is in 
charge of the particular file.

(I'm speaking from experience: Last year, I posted a couple of patches 
that went by unnoticed. That doesn't happen to me any more, these days.)


> So, if you find patches that were never reviewed in the bug's audit trail,
> you could explain the author to post it to gcc-patches.

No, useless. Do it yourself. Use "cvs annotate" to find out who might be a 
suitable reviewer and contact him. Our names are known, which raises 
chances that mails are at least looked at.


> Also, we could add a
> keyword "patch-pending" for bugs whose patch was not reviewed yet (but I
> kind of fear that reviewers are not going to query for it often...)

Correct. Thus useless.


> > Good point. I missed that. Umm, does going back to
> > 2.95 mean testing one release per branch, or testing
> > all of them? Ie, is 2.95.3, 3.0.4, 3.1.1, 3.2.3, and
> > 3.3 sufficient? Thanks,
> 
> Yes, you usually want to check with the last dot release of each branch. Of
> course, if a bug is reported against 3.2.1, and you cannot reproduce it with
> 3.2.3, you should check with 3.2.1 or 3.2.0 to see if you can reproduce it.
> Closing a bug without being able to reproduce it is a risky move.

Yes.

Also note that 3.1 and 3.2 are really the same branch. If a bug is in 
3.2.3, it's likely that it also was in 3.1.x. BTW, the versions I keep 
around are 2.95.3, 3.0.4, 3.2, 3.2.3, 3.3 and mainline. I keep both 3.2 
and 3.2.3, since between these two we started to track regressions, and 
the number of bugs fixed between them is _huge_.

W.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Wolfgang Bangerth              email:            bangerth@ices.utexas.edu
                               www: http://www.ices.utexas.edu/~bangerth/