Why not contribute? (to GCC)

[Manuel López-Ibáñez]

On 23 April 2010 21:58, HyperQuantum <hyperquantum@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 23, 2010 at 8:39 PM, Manuel López-Ibáñez
> <lopezibanez@gmail.com> 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?
>
> The lack of time, for the most part. For GCC there are other reasons as well:

Not even a sunday afternoon from time to time, instead of watching TV? ;-)

> - the paperwork. I cannot just submit a patch if I feel like it.

This you have to do once and it is done.

> - not easy to find something to contribute. Stuff that is either not
> interesting to me, or too difficult for me to easily get into. GCC is
> a mature project, so there aren't much 'holes to fill' (at first
> sight, for a beginner).

There are a lot of mini-projects in the wiki:

http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/SummerOfCode

And many stupid bugs in bugzilla.

I am sure that if you say what you would be interested to do, people
will have a thousand mini-projects for you and some developers will
offer to mentor you.

> - the programming language. I don't have any experience with C, I only
> know some things about it because it's a subset of C++.

You said it is a subset! Precisely the controversy about moving to C++
(hey! you can find more mini-projects here:
http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/gcc-in-cxx ) is the other way around: People
do not want to learn the new things of C++. If you know C++, you know
99% of C, then it is just getting used to what you cannot do in C.

> And I'm also watching other projects. I cannot contribute to all.
> Well, actually I don't contribute to any project right now. Since I
> started programming for my day job I don't really feel like
> programming in the evenings or weekends anymore. Before that I spent
> most of my free time working on my own project, my programming
> language. But now I don't even have time to work on that anymore.

Fair enoug. But still, you are subscribed to this list. That must mean
something ;-)

Cheers,

Manuel.