------- Comment #8 from esigra at gmail dot com 2008-05-07 13:08 ------- (In reply to comment #7) > Adding color output (ala ls --color) or the proposal in this bug (gcc as a > lecturer in programming) show a critical misunderstanding: Assuming that GCC > developers are bored and have nothing to do. There are many many features that > GCC developers themselves would like to see implemented and they are not > because of lack of time. Therefore, people coming up with random half-backed > ideas, which they do not intend to fully specify, much less implement, is > hopeless.
Sorry, you got it totally wrong! When someone suggests a feature that he thinks would be useful, he does definitely not imply that the current developers are bored and have nothing to do. The critical misunderstanding here is that some GCC developers think that a feature request is something that they are obliged to implement within a certain time and the only way to get rid of that obligation is to dismiss any idea, that they do not have time to implement right now, as invalid. We are developers too for various projects and we get feature requests all the time. Many of the ideas that we get are useful but there is no way that we can implement them all within the foreseeable future. Still we do not rush to dismiss ideas as invalid. And we certainly do not misconceieve it as implications that we are bored or do not have any ideas of our own. I think the criterion for closing feature requests as invalid should be modified from "we do not have time to implement this feature any time soon" to "there is no way that this feature would be useful". This is how most projects handle it and what reporters interpret it as. -- http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=31983
