Re: M4 in SuSE 7.2

[Santiago Vila]

On Sun, 14 Oct 2001, Gary V. Vaughan wrote:

> On Sat, Oct 13, 2001 at 08:41:19PM +0200, Santiago Vila wrote:
> > Interesting. Am I allowed to put m4-1.4o in Debian?
>
> Absolutely.  I have been using it for well over a year as my production
> M4.  I wouldn't put it in stable just yet mind you...

That's the problem. If I upload it for Debian unstable, it will become
part of `testing' (codenamed `woody') in ten days, and will eventually
be part of stable when woody becomes the new stable (which might happen
this year).

So: What's left for m4 to be released as 1.5? For example:

* Is the documentation in sync with the code changes since 1.4?
* Does it have some obscure bug which has not been fixed yet?
* Is there a wait for a new automake/autoconf/libtool release or something?

Last time I asked about a release date I was told m4-1.5 would be
released "next spring" (but it was spring of the year 2000 :-).

If the current code is much better than m4-1.4 and m4-1.4 is seven
years old, why not release the current code as m4-1.5, instead of
trying to make it "perfect"?