Re: Portability of preprocessor directives

[Earnie Boyd]

Thomas Dickey wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 10, 2003 at 06:58:59PM -0500, Earnie Boyd wrote:
>
> > If the OS isn't supported by the vendor is it really necessary for new 
> > releases of the tool to support such a beast.  If a hobbyist is in need 
> > of an older release, so be it, let the hobbyinsts help each other. 
> > Otherwise, there is this term known as ``porting'' that comes to mind.
> >
> > If you make it known that you need testing for a new release and testing 
> > doesn't happen for the hobbyist, then whose problem is it, yours, I 
> > think not.  Let the hobbyist test when testing is needed or else remove 
> > support for the untested in the next release from the current.
>
>
> I assume you're talking about Redhat, for instance.
> Have to be fair, you know.

No, my reference wasn't to any particular vendor.  The comments came 
from references to HP UX version 9.x but I generalized even more.

I would like to emphasize though, if the hobbyist isn't willing to test 
for new releases using his hobby environment then support for that 
environment should be removed.  A package maintainer doesn't have enough 
cycles to maintain code that no one uses and doesn't have enough cycles 
to do the testing himself.  So, if no one is testing then the maintainer 
can assume that no one is using that environment and drop support for it 
altogether.

Earnie.