Re: [Nmh-workers] Ready to roll a new release?

[Igor Sobrado]

In message <address@hidden>, address@hidden writes:
> Jon Steinhart wrote:
> >> But the patched tarball has problems building on machines that do not
> >> have GNU m4 installed.
> 
> >OK, so it sounds like I should wait on a release until this gets resolved.
> 
> Feh. I'll have a look at this. (I've also realised that I have access
> to the sourceforge compile farm, so I'll have a go at testing that we
> can compile OK on some other platforms too). This will probably not get
> done before the end of the week.

Hi!

Thanks a lot for the time you are spending on these problems.  I think
that fixing these errors will be good for the project but, please, do not
stall a release only for a issue that affects the machines I am using.
It would be great if nmh can use only standard features available in all
m4 flavours instead of proprietary ones, in the same way that it is better
a software package that can be compiled using a standard "make" utility
instead of relying on features only available in some implementations of
this command (there is an incredible large number of packages that must
be compiled using GNU "make" only because developers do not care about
fixing the makefiles to work with other "make" utilities!).

In any case, if something goes wrong with this fix, or Peter does not
have time to expend on this matter, we can delay the fix until, we say,
nmh 1.2.2 or 1.3 (2.0???).  I believe that installing GNU m4 as a
workaround to this problem is acceptable, at least for some time.

In my humble opinion, these problems should be fixed in the future.
>From my previous experience with this software project, nmh developers
are serious about portability and code quality and fixing nmh to work
on a high number of Unix systems is a goal shared by most developers.
At least, this is the way I see the project now.  ;-)

In short, if this problem can be fixed easily do it, if not,
we can install GNU m4 as a workaround until a fix is available.

Peter: do not hesitate in asking me for help.  If you need root
access to the NetBSD server at the University of Oviedo to install
and uninstall packages as GNU m4 (you probably want compiling
nmh without GNU m4 on the system), I can give you a password.
If you want to try an OpenBSD system, I can ask the staff at
Forté Computer Systems, Inc. to allow you to access to a machine
using one of my accounts on these servers (I expect that they will
agree) or set up an OpenBSD machine for you at my home.

Cheers,
Igor.