Bertrand Meltz said:
>There has been a few comments, recently, from vendor compiler engineers,
Well, two anyway.
>complaining that bug reports should be sent to the proper support
>provided by the vendor, and not to comp-fortran-90.
Absolutely!
>I understand the frustration of the compiler engineers, when hearing of a
>bug for the first time on a mailing list.
>
>However, there is often another side of the story.
>Most of the time, a dysfunction is not clearly identified as a bug.
In the one I commented on, the error message reported was
"Panic: ...
Internal error, please report this bug"
If that does not clearly indicate that is a bug I don't know what will!
I don't think it was unreasonable of me to ask that the bug be reported
as such to us, and not to the world at large. (In the event, there was
already a newer version of the compiler available with the bug fixed, so
reporting it to the world at large was a waste of time and effort by all
involved, not least to the third parties reading about it).
>Users do not always have a copy of the Standard, and even if they do,
>it is not so easy to understand.
>
>I had several cases in the last 2 or 3 years, where it took me some
>time, and help from the contributors of this list, to decide whether
>a problem was a compiler bug or not.
I concur wholeheartedly with Philip Helbig's suggestion on this one.
However, if you have compiler support from your vendor, you don't have
to have nailed down your problem as "definitely a compiler bug" before
going to them for help. Indeed, most of our support queries are not
caused by compiler bugs but are providing help to users - including
clarification of what the standard says.
It certainly makes it difficult to provide high-quality support to the
users if they won't even ask us the questions.
Cheers,
--
...........................Malcolm Cohen, NAG Ltd., Oxford, U.K.
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