On Wed, Apr 27, 2005 at 03:13:21PM -0700, Stan Shebs wrote: > No, there have been plenty of complaints, but the GCC mailing > lists have, shall we say, a "reputation", and a great many > users will not post to them, either for fear of being ridiculed, > or in the expection that they will not be heard. (Everything is > archived, and they can see what happens to others.)
Oh, come on, Stan. Compared to what? The GCC lists are quite civil compared to many free software developer lists. I'd say criticism of proposals is harsher on the Linux kernel list (though most of that criticism is fair). And if you *really* want to see a hostile environment, try debian-devel. That said, the gcc list is not intended to be a user support list, and users who come asking basic questions are (properly) asked to go elsewhere. We should make sure that we do this in a polite way, though. > Rightly or wrongly, the reward structure for GCC values new > features on the latest hardware over speedy bootstrapping on > old, so I don't expect things to change anytime soon. I will agree with you on this point, but more than half of the time to bootstrap consists of the time to build the Java library, and speeding that up is a losing battle, as Sun keeps adding new stuff that libgjc/classpath is then expected to clone, and the addition rate seems to exceed Moore's Law.