Re: egcs-1.2 stuff

[craig at jcb-sc dot com]

>Now HJ, do you suppose you could've told Craig that yourself, months
>ago, and saved us all the trouble?  <g>

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)