Re: Emacs and GFortran

[Paul Thomas <paulthomas2@wanadoo.fr>]

Eli et alia,
>   
>> Is "NO" some difficult concept for you to understand?
>>     
>
> Ah, the winning argument..
I just spent the last 15 minutes going through this thread, trying to 
understand where all this came from.  I have to confess that I am none 
the wiser.

As Thomas and Francois-Xavier have pointed out, we have a procedure for 
submitting problems and then for considering/applying the fixes.  There 
is now a PR for this problem and now somebody has to sit down and do the 
work of developing a patch that not only fixes the problem but also 
regtests, either with the testsuite as is or by modifying it to suit.

All the gfortran maintainers are part-time volunteers and are fortran 
users.  Our interests and priorities tend to reflect our fortran usage.  
That said, we have put a lot of energy into making the compiler produce 
correct code and to approach the performance of the best commercial 
compilers.  In addition to supporting our own interests, we try very 
hard to do a public service role by fixing bugs submitted through 
Bugzilla, as quickly as possible.  Many reporters have expressed 
satisfaction with our efforts.  The format of error messages happens to 
be something that has not risen to the top of the pile.

Hostility, such as it is, has been triggered by the hectoring attitude 
of those who have crept out of the woodwork to add their halfpenny worth 
to this thread; none of whom have contributed to gfortran, as far as I 
know.  I rather think that the steering committee would support the 
gfortran maintainers, were it to come to that. 

Please do the work, rather than rather rudely insisting that others do 
it - submit a patch and I promise that I for one will take a look at 
it.  In the meantime, I am going to try to put the interface meta-bug to 
bed :-)

Let's cool it now please; there's too much to do spend any more time on 
this correspondence.

Paul