GNATS survey

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

Yesterday, I had meant to spend my day skydiving, but then we had 100% 
cloud cover over central Texas and I ended up mailing with Giovanni about 
the state of GNATS and a couple of suggestions he had. The upshot was: we 
would like to go through all the C++/C/Optimization PRs and check them for 
validity. Of public interest in this respect is that we also would like to 
change one of the policies in assigning states to PRs. Here's what:

- there are a couple of reports that are just "confirmed", but without
  a small, reproducible testcase. That's a particular problem if 
  preprocessed sources were generated with a pre-3.4 compiler
- thus, we would like to reserve the "analyzed" state for PRs that are
  both confirmed and equipped with a small testcase
  NOTE: we're presently talking only about C++/C/opt PRs.

This requires:
- someone do go through GNATS and check existing reports. Giovanni and
  I plan to do this. If someone else wants to help us, drop us a note
  and we re-split the existing reports among everyone
- that everyone who sometimes confirms PRs keep to above rules, i.e.
  "analyzed" only if he also reduces the testcase
- we will find a couple of PRs that we are not sure whether they are 
  standard conforming or not; it would be great if some of the language
  gurus could volunteer to look at some of them as we find them so that we 
  could be sure that after the clean-up everything that is "analyzed" 
  really is.

Does that sound sensible?

W.

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