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Re: [gfortran] SIGH! How to alienate a contributor
On Saturday 20 November 2004 02:53, Steve Kargl wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 20, 2004 at 02:37:54AM +0100, Steven Bosscher wrote:
> > On Saturday 20 November 2004 02:24, Steve Kargl wrote:
> > > The first small patch was available on Sat, 13 Nov 2004.
> >
> > Oh no!! A *whole* week! Say it ain't so!!
>
> I only have 2 weeks of annual leave that I can dedicate to
> gfortran. One week is gone.
I have more time over the whole year, but less in the normal
week. In fact, other than in the weekends I don't do any GCC
hacking at all (try not to, anyway). We just don't have any
person working full time on gfortran.
One problem is that it's hard to review patches that lack a
proper explanation. For example, just now on IRC Paul pointed
out to me that the argument to the UMASK function really should
be forced to be a kind 4 integer (32 bits) to match mode_t from
"man umask(2)" - so what I've just commited to CVS is in fact
incorrect.
You cannot expect of the reviewers to be intimately familiar
with each and every UNIX function. You *can* make reviewing
*much* easier by adding an elaborate explanation of the details
of the patches (yours, mine, anyone's). Now I actually had to
look up UMASK/UNLINK in the g77 manual, and I still managed to
fsck that up.
The more obvious you can make your patch, the easier it is for
a reviewer to say "yes" and commit it.
> > Dude. With an attitude like that, I'd never get any of my own
> > patches into the parts of GCC that I'm not a maintainer of - which
> > is basically all of GCC except fortran. I've got 6 or 7 patches
> > pending now that nobody has even *looked* at yet, let alone approve
> > them or commit them.
>
> Are your 6 or 7 patches editing the same 5 files?
As a matter of fact they are :-(
> Writer-after-approval isn't very valuable if no one is reviewing
> patches. It's only after a scathing email that anyone responds
> (with apologies to Janne).
You cannot expect everyone to jump in line when you happen to
find some time to do some hacking. We're all still volunteers.
And as I told you off-list, I never received your reply to the
comments Janne had on your patch.
We try to do our best here. See Paul's reply to your question
about "fortran unit number <--> C file descriptor". My mailer
claims there were less than 10 minutes between your question and
Paul's answer. Nobody's ignoring you, or your patches.
Gr.
Steven