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Re: Proposal for fixing automake (was Re: State of automake packages)



On Sun, Jun 09, 2002 at 10:59:06PM +0900, Junichi Uekawa wrote:
> > If three more people step up to do this, and one or two people step up to
> > do all the autobuilding, we can make short work of the entire contents of
> > sid, I suspect.  And given authority to generally abuse power and NMU
> > packages with purely the auto* fixes if the maintainer doesn't do so in a
> > reasonable timeframe, I suspect it won't be too hard.
> 
> I have a very large backlog of build failures listed in
> BTS already, which I myself cannot really process within a 
> reasonable timeframe.
> 
> I don't think it's feasible to get something like that done.

I'm not talking about FTBFS bugs here, I'm talking about building
everything which uses auto* against current versions and noting the
failures in a central non-BTS location for people who have both time and
experience to fix them as part of a project-wide transition.  Once this
has been done, patches which fix it may be sent both upstream and to the
Debian BTS.

I'm not advocating maintainers do this themselves right away, since I'm
advocating that this be done quickly and I know it won't happen if we
leave it to the individual maintainers to fix as they will or can.  (I
happen to know a couple developers off hand who simply don't grok auto* at
all.  At least one of them is an accomplished C/C++ programmer, but
doesn't understand autoconf well and automake even less.  I'm sure there
are others.  This is no different than me really - to this day I still
can barely read, much less sanely write, anything at all in perl.

Now, if in a month or so after this is done, if these patches are not
applied, I advocate an NMU because we're talking about a project-wide
transition here and we can't expect this to be held up forever by a
maintainer who doesn't want to make an upload to apply the patch.  This is
where I see the potential for complaints.


> I think we already have some unfixed build failures caused by
> the new libtool.

I am not certain as I am not aware of all of the issues, but many of these
problems could likely get fixed automagically by people porting packages
to current autothings.

-- 
Joseph Carter <knghtbrd@bluecherry.net>        Sanity is counterproductive
 
<lilo> "PLEASE RESPECT INTELLECTUAL RIGHTS!"
<lilo> "Please demonstrate intellect." ;)

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