bugzilla voting

[Scott Robert Ladd]

Ian Lance Taylor wrote:
> Scott Robert Ladd <coyote@coyotegulch.com> writes:
> 
> 
>>>That sentiment would be an argument against enabling voting.  I
>>>certainly would not want to give assurances any stronger than that I
>>>just *might* take votes into account occasionally.
>>
>>If that is your attitude, and it reflects the attitude of other
>>primary GCC developers, then voting or lobbying are indeed meaningless.
> 
> Speaking as someone who actually does fix random PRs, I think voting
> would be useful.  As everyone else has said, it obviously would not be
> any sort of guarantee.

I much appreciate people such as yourself; I wish I had more time to 
work on GCC myself, beyond my own paltry efforts on OpenMP and gfortran.

The value of voting directly corresponds to the amount of influence it 
has -- as per the last U.S. Presidential election, where the popular 
vote was overridden by judicial fiat. If people vote for bugs, they will 
quickly become disillusioned by Per's "*might* take votes into account 
occasionally" viewpoint.

Please note that I am not criticizing Pers! A purely democratic approach 
won't work, either, as under such, the only bugs that would get fixed 
are those for very popular platforms. A system of checks and bal;ances 
would be needed to free developers from absolute dictates while also 
assuring voters that their votes mean something. Tricky.

> Right now my random PR fixing is driven mainly by the list of PRs
> reported against 3.4.0 (there are only five remaining 3.4.0 PRs in the
> search which I use; right now I'm slowly poking at PR 14400).

I'm only working in the 3.5 (tree-ssa) branch, given that OpenMP and 
gfortran reside there. I've got a couple of patches waiting to go in as 
soon as tree-ssa merges...

-- 
Scott Robert Ladd
Coyote Gulch Productions (http://www.coyotegulch.com)
Software Invention for High-Performance Computing