On Wed, Jun 26, 2002 at 03:54:06PM +0200, Mateusz Papiernik wrote: > > If you mean the fact that AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE takes a new parameter, i > > believe it's optional, so it does not break anything. > > unfortunately, old scripts using automake 1.5 WON'T WORK with > automake 1.6 - so it break everything. Mine worked without problems. Someone (forget now) did show me one which didn't, but it had nothing to do with automake - autoconf 2.13 -> 2.53 was the problem. I downloaded the source, looked at the files the error message was complaining about, and had a fix within literally five minutes. Bugs I've found in both 1.5 and 1.6 do render the possibility of an incompatibility, though I've not seen one yet. This isn't brain surgery. It's shell scripts, make, and m4. Now m4 may be archaic and people seldom use it or try to understand it anymore. But shell scripts and make are not the sort of things a Debian maintainer may be excused from having at least a passing familiarity with. Given that packaging something for Debian generally involves both, this is supposed to be the sort of thing the NM process is checking for when they consider a person's technical compitency. Actually, I think this is almost justification for expecting a prospective NM to be able to demonstrate they can build a package without debhelper. When I decided I wanted to contribute to Debian, I had to learn to use both sh and make sanely enough to do so. Today a developer drops a canned debhelperized rules script into place, edits four lines, and he's done. Even my half-witted brother has demonstrated proficiency building packages using this method. Certainly I wouldn't want to maintain a package without these tools I've come to find make life so much simpler. Yet, I just found xscreensaver this morning does it all by hand. That such packages still exist is testiment to the fact that maintainers need to be able to do it. And if a maintainer can be expected to do that, minor bugs in autothingy scripts should not be an impassible hurdle. That said, a maintainer reminded me this morning on hearing the above opinion that I still don't speak perl fluently. This is true; I'm going to spend this weekend with my nose in the perl CD bookshelf changing that. If I expect others to know enough sh/make to be useful maintainers, then I should expect myself to know perl well enough to be compitent with it for the same reason. (And naturally, fortune has been replaced with an AI..) -- Joseph Carter <knghtbrd@bluecherry.net> Now I'll take over the world <Shinobi> There are worse things than Perl....ASP comes to mind
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