Re: Emacs and GFortran

[Steven Bosscher]

On Thursday 02 November 2006 21:22, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > Date: Thu, 2 Nov 2006 20:00:05 +0100
> > From: Thomas Koenig <address@hidden>
> > Cc: address@hidden, address@hidden,
> >     Steve Kargl <address@hidden>, address@hidden
> >
> > If your patch is non-trivial, we need copyright papers from you
> > assigning copyright of any changes to the gcc source tree to
> > the FSF.  Do you have a copyright assignment?
>
> Yes, he does (and you should have been able to check that yourself in
> copyright.list).

You should have been able to check that not all GCC developers
can check copyright.list, thank you very much.

> > If these conditions are met, then post the patch to
> > address@hidden and address@hidden  Usually there
> > will be a discussion of the patch, possibly leading to requirements
> > for changes.  Finally, if all goes well, a maintainer will approve
> > the patch and (if you don't have commit privileges) commit it.
>
> If I were Alfred, I'd hesitate to submit a patch, given the attitude
> of several GFortranners.  That attitude is so hostile that I'd suggest
> to talk to the steering committee about it.

Puh-lease...

If anyone is really hostile here, it is AMS, and you're on the border
of hostility yourself.  What in the world are you trying to achieve
with all this whining?  Chasing away gfortran developers?

Try as you might, the fact is that you can't force volunteers to do
what you want.

In the case of gfortran, all developers are volunteers, and it just so
happens that most of us like gfortran's current way of reporting errors.

The people who work on gfortran are usually people who need a Fortran
compiler for their research/hobby/work/etc.  They work on things they
believe are important.  Apparently they don't use Emacs, so the error
format issue, which has existed since the incarnation of the project
6 years ago, is just not a major issue for any gfortran developers.
If a developer would care, the issue would be fixed.

Should gfortran conform to the GNU standards? Preferably yes.  But if
no developer (volunteer!) cares to make it so, tough luck but it is not
going to happen.

Then you arrogant folks come in, doing nothing but complaining and
telling respected gfortran developers (nice people, I know some of them
in person) that they basically don't know what they're talking about,
and that The Only Right Way is the way you want things to be even though
the patches AMS has posted clearly show he has no understanding of the
gfortran diagnostics mechanisms.

How arrogant, you should be ashamed of yourselves.

So go ahead and take it up with the SC, and watch to see gfortran hackers
getting so frustrated with your whining that they just give up on the
whole project and just invest their precious time in something that does
not require interacting with people like you.


> > That's the way gcc and gfortran maintenance works.  In practice,
> > it works pretty well.
>
> Well for whom, exactly?

For me, at least.  And for everyone else in the GCC community, AFAICT.

Now, can you go be frustrated about something eise in some place else?

Gr.
Steven