GCC

[Steven Bosscher <s dot bosscher at student dot tudelft dot nl>]

Hi,

In the "Processor Architect's Panel" at the kernel summit, GCC was
apparently discussed shortly:

"Jon 'maddog' Hall said that the various processor architectures wild
also benefit from paying more attention to gcc. The architects responded
uniformly with complaints about how difficult it is to work with the gcc
team. They all understand their interest in having gcc work will with
their processors, but actually getting patches into the gcc code base is
difficult."  (http://lwn.net/Articles/40831/)

I'm not sure why they think it is so difficult.  It would seem that if
the patch is architecture-specific and well-formed (ie. conforming to
the coding style, etc), it typically just goes in, period.  And patches
to target-independent code may go through one or two review cycles, but
again, if the patch looks good, it goes in.  At least, I got the
impression that patches are seldomly rejected.

So why would these people think it's difficult to work with the people
on this list, and to contribute code (and what can be done about it)?

Gr.
Steven