What is wrong with Bugzilla? [Was: Re: GCC and Floating-Point]

[Uros Bizjak <uros at kss-loka dot si>]

Hello Scott!

> I do know this: Many, many scientific and mathematical programmers find
> GCC frustrating and annoying, and most of those folk know far more about
> numbers than I do. I wish more of these people would feel comfortable
> posting to the GCC list, rather than sending private e-mails to my
> inbox.
At this point, I wonder what is wrong with Bugzilla, that those 
programmers don't fill a proper bug report. If there is a problem with 
GCC, that is so annoying to somebody, I think that at least developers 
could be informed about it via their standard channels of communication. 
If there is a specific problem, at least it can be analysed properly and 
perhaps some actions could be taken to fix it. If the problem is indeed 
_that_ big (usually, it is not!), then a workaround could be suggested - 
and this bug, together with a workaround is documented in bugzilla for 
others, until the problem is properly solved (usually with a testcase). 
I guess that these persons don't know that bugreports are extremmely 
important for the development of gcc. The users themself are actaully a 
QA department of open source development;)

There is no problem that Bugzilla is un-intuitive, it is far from that. 
The users don't fill bugreports because they are afraid of filling an 
invalid report or a duplicate. I can't speak for gcc bugmasters, but it 
looks to me that dupes and invalid reports are not that big problem.

Is perhaps some kind of anonymous account needed (as in Slashdot's case) 
to encourage these users to fill bugreports? Their knowledge of specific 
problems could help gcc to became better, so it indeed is a win-win 
situation.

> However, the atmosphere of GCC development is... well, let's just
> say that my investment in asbestos underware has not been wasted. ;)
I would call it an atmosphere of brainstorming. Different opinions and 
different point of views. The only problem is, that words can be 
different if people sit 3000 km/miles/whatever apart ;)

Uros.