Why not contribute? (to GCC)

[Joel Sherrill]

On 04/24/2010 02:07 PM, Leif Ekblad wrote:
> Why do I not contribute to GCC? Well, I tried to get some really simple
> patches for RDOS
> accepted in 2006, but it seemed to take forever. I'm not sure if they have
> been accepted now,
> or if the binutils patches (which were accepted) are still there. For
> somebody wanting to support
> a new OS with GCC (that is not unix-style), the patch acceptance policy is
> simply making the
> whole process impossible to do in reasonable time. Such a new OS will need
> hundreds or
> even thousands of patches, and getting all of these accepted in reasonable
> time seems more
> or less impossible.
>    
Maybe my search is wrong but "rdos site:gcc.gnu.org" doesn't
turn it up.

I don't know how divergent rdos from any other OS that is
not self-hosted and is cross-compiled but there shouldn't
be 100s or 1000s of patches required to support an OS on gcc
unless you have a divergent object format or are including
a new CPU.

Also you haven't mentioned two major issues that are
not "patch" related.

(1) Did you arrange for a maintainer for the rdos target?

(2) Did you submit test results with the port?

(3) Has copyright assignment paperwork been dealt with?

I maintain the *-rtems* targets (~12 architectures) and there
just isn't much special to them in contrast to the large amount of
code that just works fine with a bit of OS specific configuration
and glue.

Not to pick but from Google'ing the mailing list, I just see you
asking questions.  I didn't find code being submitted.

And speaking from experience, if you submit code and it doesn't
get reviewed and merged.  Ask again.  The submitter cares a lot
more about it than anyone else and that's just the nature of the
game.  If you don't care enough about your area to follow up, why
should anyone else?
> When I had given up on GCC, I got interested in OpenWatcom. They gave me a
> new branch
> to work in, and eventually helped me integrate my changes with trunk. This
> worked very well
> and RDOS will be supported in the upcoming 1.9 release.
>    
And if you had arranged for the things above, the gcc community
would have supported you doing the same.  There are a number of
Microblaze and other special project branches.


> The 2006 patches I worked a lot to find out are probably totally obsolete
> today, and needs to
> be done from scratch again. This is the nature of supporting new OSes. I
> just doesn't work
> to find out the patches if nobody cares to incorporate them, as they will
> quickly become obsolete.
> However, I suspect that the community is only interested in supporting
> unix-like environments,
> where these issues doesn't exist.
>
>    
Depends.  Not seeing the patches I can't say but I have maintained
patches for odd RTEMS targets (e.g. sparc64 and nios) off the
main source across multiple major gcc releases without any
real problems.

--joel
> Leif Ekblad
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Ross Ridge"<rridge@csclub.uwaterloo.ca>
> To:<gcc@gcc.gnu.org>
> Sent: Saturday, April 24, 2010 2:12 PM
> Subject: Re: Why not contribute? (to GCC)
>
>
>    
>> Manuel López-Ibáñez writes:
>>      
>>> What reasons keep you from contributing to GCC?
>>>        
>> The big reason the copyright assignment.  I never even bothered to read
>> it, but as I don't get anything in return there's no point.  Why should
>> put obligaitons on myself, open myself up to even unlikely liabilities,
>> just so my patches can merged into the official source distribution?
>> I work on software on my own time to solve my own problems.  I'm happy
>> enough not "horde" it and give it away for "free", but it doesn't
>> make much difference to me if anyone else actually ends up using it.
>> I can have my own patched version of GCC that does what I want without
>> signing anything.
>>
>> Another reason is the poor patch submission process.  Why e-mail a patch
>> if I know, as a new contributor, there's a good chance it won't even be
>> looked at by anyone?  Why would I want to go through I a process where I'm
>> expected to keep begging until my patch finally gets someone's attention?
>>
>> I also just don't need the abuse.  GCC, while not the most of hostile of
>> open source projects out there, it's up there.  Manuel López-Ibáñez's
>> unjustified hostility towards Michael Witten in this thread is just a
>> small example.
>>
>> Finally, it's also a lot of work.  Just building GCC can be pain, having
>> to find upto date versions of a growing list of math libraries that
>> don't benefit me in the slightest way.  Running the test suite takes a
>> long time, so even trivial patches require a non-trivial amount of work.
>> Anything more serious can take a huge ammount of time.  I've abandonded
>> projects once I realized it would be lot quicker to find some other
>> solution like using assembly, rather than trying to get GCC to do what
>> I wanted it to do.
>>
>> Now these are just the main reasons why I don't contribute to GCC.
>> I'm not arguing that any these issues need to be or can be fixed.  If I
>> had what I thought where good solutions that would be better overall to
>> GCC then I'd have suggested them long ago.
>>
>> I will add, that I don't think code quality is a problem with GCC.  I hate
>> the GNU coding style as much as anyone, but it's used consistantly and
>> that's what matters.  Compared other open and closed projects I've seen
>> it's as easy to understand and maintain as anything.  GNU binutils is
>> a pile of poo, but I don't know of any codebase the size of GCC that's
>> as nice to work with.
>>
>> Ross Ridge
>>
>>
>>      
>