On Tue, 10 Mar 2020, Zack Weinberg wrote:
The git commits are more a factor of who has the personal ability to
make commits than whether the commits are the most important changes
needed.
What you say is true, but I only have a finite amount of time to put
into this, and I currently think that additional testing will be a
more effective use of that time than finding unreviewed patches within
the past eight years' worth of mailing list archives. To put it
another way, would you rather see me find unreviewed patches or would
you rather see me run a Debian archive rebuild with a 2.70 release
candidate as /usr/bin/autoconf?
Running a Debian archive rebuild will produce useful information but
Autoconf is fundamentally a portability tool and testing it on one of
the best supported and most popular GNU/Linux distributions does not
demonstrate portability.
The concern is that patches for interesting "new" systems may have
been missed, or that less popular systems and targets may have changed
their behavior in the mean-time, or that non-portable dependance on
GNU tools has crept in. It would be particularly unfortunate
if the system or target which was missed is based on free software and
that patches were submitted.
Hopefully people using less popular systems have not given up on
Autoconf and will notice this discussion.
Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
Public Key, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/public-key.txt
