Re: Portability of preprocessor directives

[Thomas Dickey]

On Tue, Mar 11, 2003 at 10:21:54AM -0500, Earnie Boyd wrote:
> 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.

the context of the discussion is placing the burden on the person asking
for information.  Rather than give the requested information, the so-called
maintainer is spending most of his words dismissing the request.

If I were asking for information (not likely for this set of people - too
often I've observed it done this way over the past ten years), I'd have to
consider his response rude.

-- 
Thomas E. Dickey <address@hidden>
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net