Re: egcs-1.1.2 bug report

[Richard Earnshaw <rearnsha at arm dot com>]

> Just FYI: I don't run *any* automatic decoder on incoming email.

You aren't the only one.

> So, when I see an email like yours, full of unreadable (non-plain) text,
> I look at the subject header.
> 
> Since "egcs-1.1.2 bug report" tells me basically nothing about whether
> it's a Fortran (g77 or libg2c) bug, I ignore it.
> Others might do the same, for their areas of expertise.

Certainly, I just don't have enough hours in the day to start looking into 
something that is 99% likely to be irrelevant to the parts of the compiler 
I maintain.

>   -  Put a summary of the bug in plaintext at the top, e.g. "compiler
>      crashed on C code".

Not good enough, I would ignore such a message as a front-end problem.

> 
>   -  Put a one-line summary in the "Subject" header, e.g. "compiler crash
>      on C code, egcs-1.1.2".

Still not good enough.

> That being said, I'm personally much happier with some combination of
> uuencode, gzip, bzip, and tar than with *anything* relating to MIME.
> MIME decoding has worked about 2% of the times I've tried it.  The
> other decoders work about 99% of the time.

Is there any chance that we could add some sort of flag to the compiler 
-create-bug-report (or a script that would be run invoke gcc with the 
correct options (gcc-bug-report ...) that would create a file with all the 
components necessary for submitting the bug and then point a user to it 
and ask them to mail it to the bug list (I don't think mailing should be 
automatic for security reasons).

What I'd like to see at the *top* of each report is something like the 
following:

	Language:	C
	Version:	gcc 2.95
	Target: 	sparc-sun-solaris2.5
	Host:		i386-unknown-linux

The only line in the above that I would consider optional is the Host 
line, and then only if it is the same as the target.  Maybe the 
Canadian-cross people would want to go even further.

Richard.