Re: [DEAD] APPEAL to steering committee: [Bug target/23605]memset() Optimization on x86-32 bit

[Daniel Berlin <dberlin at dberlin dot org>]

On Mon, 2005-08-29 at 01:33 -0400, Kevin McBride wrote:
> Joe Buck wrote:
> > I've looked at the bug in bugzilla; it's not marked as invalid, though
> > I tend to agree with Andrew and Ian's comments in the log.
> 
> I set the bug back to unconfirmed after I noticed that, in my opinion, 
> there can be more optimization done.
> 
> > In any case, the SC doesn't get involved in cases like this.  And even
> > if the SC lost its sanity and decided to micromanage Bugzilla as you
> > ask, it would take a 3/4 vote, and you certainly wouldn't get mine.
> 
> I didn't realize that the SC had no control over Bugzilla.  Unless there 
> was something I missed, all what the web site said was:
> 
>  > In April 1999 the steering committee was appointed by the FSF as the
>  > official GNU maintainer for GCC and changed its name to GCC steering
>  > committee.

Yes, they control the overall direction.
They don't micromanage.

> 
> All I can now say is:
> 
> If no one on the GCC team wants to fully investigate my bug, then 
> there's nothing I can do about the bug except to implement the fix in my 
> own code.

If you want to see what's up, feel free. Nobody will stop you.  If you
want to propose a patch, feel free.

As for "no one on the GCC team", you seem to have a misunderstanding
about how GCC ends up working.  It's not like we have people paid who go
through all the enhancement requests or something.  The fact that the
bugs are in Bugzilla is just a way to track bugs.  It does not in any
way guarantee that your bug will be looked at, regardless of whether it
is open, closed, invalid, not invalid, etc.  There is no guarantee that
your bug will or won't be fixed for a certain release, etc, unless *you*
start submitting the patches to fix it.  Certainly, there are certain
classes of bugs that are more likely to be looked at than others, etc.
In addition, there are some people who are more attentive to certain
pieces of the compiler than others, and will go looking for enhancement
requests in bugzilla to fix.  This is not by stretch of the imagination
something that people do across the board.

In other words, the best way to get a bug attention is generally to give
that bug attention yourself.  

The other day we had someone who believed that if we marked his bug
"enhancement" instead of "minor", it was "misclassifying" and would
cause havoc.  The reality is that nobody was going to fix his bug
anytime soon, regardless of how it was marked, because he wasn't going
to, and it just wasn't high priority.


> 
> This appeal started up over misunderstandings between Andrew Pinski, Ian 
> Lance Taylor, and I.  I felt that Ian Lance Taylor agreed with me prior 
> to submitting the bug to the bug tracker, and so, felt humiliated by 
> Andrew Pinski's comments. 

At the risk of Andrew hating me (:P), this, sadly, is not the first time
someone has taken offense at his comments in a bug.  You shouldn't take
it personally.


>  When Ian Lance Taylor stepped in, he made the 
> misunderstanding obvious to me, and so, I did what I could to see if gcc 
> was performing optimizations as much as possible.
> 
> This appeal is now dead.  Let's get on with our projects, regardless if 
> my bug report will ever be turned into a bug fix.

Again, if you want a bug fix, your best course of action is to fix it :)