[CondensedBrain]

You can frame a critique in a way that doesn't make the subject feel targeted.

Some tips:

* Rather than call their way atrocious, try something like "Use $(CC) instead of hard coding gcc to avoid a lot of headaches down the road."

* Instead of:

>> "This also raises in me the suspicion that it hasn't been tested with no compiler other than GCC at whatever version the developer had installed on his machine, which is bad."

Consider:

"Test on other machines to make sure you don't depend on quirks of your local gcc installation."

Don't tear down. Build up.