I think we had a thread sometime recently about the problems with getting into open-source projects. I thought I'd share an experience I had yesterday.
I have several numerical solvers written in Fortran. I wanted to test them out using quad precision arithmetic. Fortran makes it easy to do this, all you have to do is change the kind parameter of your flaoting-point variables.
Apparently the quad support is still in its infancy, as some simple calculations caused segfaults on both MinGW and Linux gfortran compilers. So I filed a bug report on the GCC bugtracker.
Someone from the GCC team apparently saw the word MinGW and basically closed the report off as a MinGW-only problem. When I pointed out that I had tested on GNU/Linux plain GCC, I was met with hostility by this individual and he basically made every attempt to make me look dumb instead of being helpful. Basically made me feel like an .............. when I went out of my way to try and help the project by reporting the bug.
I had provided a clear description of what the problem was, what compiler flags were responsible, and the code to reproduce the problem. I later posted a GDB backtrace as well.
I'm not going to link to the bug on the bug tracker, I'll just leave it at my involvement with the bug-fixing process ended as of last night when I called this person another phrase for f-ing female genitals.
I had heard that it's difficult to get into the GCC and Linux projects. Congrats to the GCC team in holding up their reputation. I hope Clang wins.