Re: Reporting bugs: there is nothing to gain in frustratingreporters

[Daniel Berlin <dberlin at dberlin dot org>]

On Thu, 2005-06-16 at 10:51 -0400, Scott Robert Ladd wrote:
> Dan Kegel wrote:
> > And then there's the GCC summit, if you're really serious.
> 
> I'd certainly love to attend, but can't afford it with the medical bills
> we've accumulated. Hospitalizing both the primary bread-winners has a
> dramatic affect on finances. ;)
> 
> > I think what gets peoples' blood pressure up is
> > endless discussion about how they ought to do their
> > business.
> 
> Try publishing a compiler review, and listen to the kibitzers. :)
> 
I've actually done this before, back in the BeOS days , of gcc vs
Metrowerks.  Kibitzers raise the same issues that many trolls on our
mailing lists do too. Strange, isn't it?

> I've been writing for publication all my adult life; just because people
> don't like what you write (software or prose) is no reason to be rude.
> They might actually have valid points...
> 

And it might be possible that in the past 5 years, endless discussion
has been had on most of these points, and the person positing the
viewpoint is not in any way raising new reasoning or anything else, they
just want to throw their same 2 cents in again and again and again and
again and again and again and again (which i'm sure you'll say is us
"not listening to the user community", which is not the case).

We've also had people write to other mailing lists and say "plesae
mail-bomb the gcc list so they'll listen to us"

If your whole "community is unfriendly" is about discussion of floating
point issues, than i'll just go away, because yes, over the past 8
years, we've become very unfriendly about the small number of people who
contend again and again that we should do it different, claiming simply
that any viewpoint than theirs is *wrong* and *bad* instead of "a
tradeoff that has been chosen".  And they are *not* particularly polite
about it.



> ..Scott