Hi Jerry, all, as already said, the basic issue appears to be the low number of contributors, most (all?) of which are working on gfortran in their spare time (like me). I think it is not likely that they will commit to being available regularly.
I have used IRC once for a discussion that was really helpful for me, but we agreed in advance to meet there, and this was how it worked. Other tools may work similar or even better. (The ML was just not appropriate for the type of discussion.) A collaboration tool could be helpful for introducing newcomers, for giving advice in trying to understand how the code works, and maybe when it doesn't. Caveat: in many respects I still feel as close to being a newcomer. Though I could give a very basic introduction to working with git, also in the context of gcc, if that is needed... ;-) (Perhaps using git even is more fun than programming in C :-) Personally, many things work fine for me using bugzilla and the mailing list. I just don't expect immediate replies because of the current situation. So can we get the attention of new possible contributors? Or increase the activity of some of those who've been contributing in the past? So that a critical mass is reached for a modern collaboration tool to be useful? Cheers, Harald
