Re: Portability of preprocessor directives

[Andreas Buening]

Earnie Boyd wrote:

[snip]

> 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.

What do you consider a hobbyist system? I guess, 99.99% of all people
(maybe even more) don't test software packages as long as they don't
need to do. I remember Debian hit the 8000 package limit some time
ago. How many of the software packages you use for your daily work
do you really test? 1000? 100? I guess, it's less. Much less.
If it's just 1 then you do much more than 99.x% of all people do.
Having no tester for a specific system doesn't mean there are no users.
Not all packages have as many contributors as autoconf. If you immediately
drop support for all systems when you don't have a tester then you will
hurt all systems that are not a standard Red Hat Linux out of the box
installation. You won't get a feedback one day after you've released
the new version of foo, maybe not even this year, maybe in two years
when Joe User wants to compile the cool new xyz program on SysBlurb which
needs the great and unique abc library. And to compile abc he needs the
latest version of foo and this doesn't work because "there was no tester
so nobody needs foo on SysBlurb".


Bye,
Andreas