when (not) use bugzilla for GCC?

[Basile STARYNKEVITCH <basile at starynkevitch dot net>]

Hello All,


Please accept my apologies if the questions below are too naive!

I have several questions about bugzilla and GCC. I am not very familiar 
with bugzilla, and I am not familiar with the configuration of GCC 
bugzilla in particular.

I cannot understand when should I use or not bugzilla. More precisely, I 
have several examples of "bugs" but I didn't use bugzilla for them


1. I regularily test the latest gcc trunk with -flto on a medium sized 
program. And it always crashes, with a sisegv fatal error. My feeling is 
that it should not crash that way (at least, I would prefer a message 
such as not enough memory to compile with -flto). Should I report that 
as a bug on bugzilla? I am not able at all to reduce that example to 
something smaller.

For the record, that program is Jacques Pitrat's MALICE system 
http://pagesperso-orange.fr/jacques.pitrat/MALICE.html
about 370KLOC  (less than 14Mbytes total) of C files (all 2947 C files 
are generated and usually short, MALICE is bootstrapped that is 
generates all its C code; the C code is not understandable!). I would 
imagine that it is not big enough to reach the limits of my 8Gb desktop!


Should I report that as a bug?


2. a couple of weeks ago, I submitted a patch regarding gengtype for 
plugins (the patch was greatly improved by Rafael Espindola 
espindola@google.com) and the patch did correct a bug. 
http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2009-10/msg00379.html
but I never bothered registering it (since making the initial patch was 
easier than reporting a bug). This is also the case of 
http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2009-10/msg00809.html
(fatal error when failing to register a pass)


3. On the MELT branch, I regularily find bugs & correct them, and it did 
happen that someone registered a MELT bug on the bugzilla; I did correct 
it but AFAIR was not permitted to close the bug. Sometimes I am sad of 
not being able to report MELT bugs on bugzilla and to close them when I 
feel I have covered them.





My current intuition is that bugzilla might be reserved for bugs of the 
trunk mostly  for which a small testcase is available, and which is a 
bug affecting many users (this is not the case of all the bugs 
mentionned above).

So when should I use bugzilla? I am a bit "scared" to use it!


I hope I am not offending anyone, and I admit that I am not familiar 
with bugzilla in general and its GCC policy & setting in particular.

I also am guessing that bugzilla is less important for the GCC community 
than in some other big free software communities. It does not seem to be 
a major communication channel.

Regards.
--
Basile STARYNKEVITCH         http://starynkevitch.net/Basile/
email: basile<at>starynkevitch<dot>net mobile: +33 6 8501 2359
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*** opinions {are only mines, sont seulement les miennes} ***