Re: Why not contribute? (to GCC)

[Mark Mielke <mark at mark dot mielke dot cc>]

Copying David Daney's response to contrast against it:

GCC is a mature piece of software that works really well and it is in a 
programming domain which is not as well understood and for people such 
as myself, I would be intimidated from the start, to delve in and expect 
any contributions I make to be valuable enough to bother the existing 
machine with. :-)

But yes, if I overcame that intimidation, I'm sure David Daney's 
comments would describe the *next* barrier to overcome...

Cheers,
mark


On 04/23/2010 03:33 PM, David Daney wrote:
> On 04/23/2010 11:39 AM, Manuel López-Ibáñez wrote:
> > This seems to be the question running around the blogosphere for
> > several projects. And I would like to ask all people that read this
> > list but hardly say or do anything.
> >
> > What reasons keep you from contributing to GCC?
>
> I am going to answer why I think it is, even though I like to think 
> that I do do something.
>
>
> GCC has high standards, so anybody attempting to make a contribution 
> for the first time will likely be requested to go through several 
> revisions of a patch before it can be accepted.
>
> After having spent considerable effort developing a patch, there can 
> be a sense that the merit of a patch is somehow related to the amount 
> of effort expended creating it.  Some people don't have a personality 
> well suited to accepting criticism of something into which they have 
> put a lot of effort.  The result is that in a small number of cases, 
> people Bad Mouth GCC saying things like:  The GCC maintainers are a 
> clique of elitist idiots that refuse to accept good work from outsiders.
>
> Personally I don't agree with such a view, and I don't think there is 
> much that can be done about it.  There will always be Vocal 
> Discontents, and trying to accommodate all of them would surly be 
> determental to GCC.
>
> I think that some potential contributors are discouraged from 
> contributing because they have been frightened away (by the Vocal 
> Discontents mentioned above) before they can get started.
>
>
> David Daney