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Re: Fixing Bugs (Was: A Suggestion for Release Testing)
Scott Robert Ladd wrote:
the gist of Mark's polite rant?
And to fix bugs, I'm expected to learn a variation on Lisp and GIMPLE as
well. I'm not saying that expectation is wrong, I am saying it is an
impediment to working on GCC.
with respect, I disagree, and I think you should invest the effort
before you hazard an opinion here. Compilers are complex beasts, and
all involve intermediate languages, and of course these intermediate
languages must be learned before you can do anything.
If there is a lack of people fixing bugs, don;t necessarily blame it on
people being lazy. Maybe being a volunteer GCC developer is more
difficult than it needs to be?
I think a lot of what happens is that easy bugs do get fixed. The ones
that don't are often complex, or ill-reported, and thus tend to require
a lot of knowledge to work on effectively.
I haven't filed many bug reports recently (though I have in the past)
because I didn't feel that the effort was justified by the result.
Not that I've given up entirely: I've recently asked about how certain
problems should be reported. For example, -floop-optimize2 is a
pessimism for many algorithms. Is that a bug, or simply a feature that
is not yet fully implemented?
This is a good example of something that likely can only be effectively
worked on by someone with a considerable amount of gcc knowledge.