Re: Old Autoconf release dates?

[Brett Smith]

On Tue, Feb 11, 2003 at 09:23:59AM +0200, Bernd Jendrissek wrote:
> I have the autoconf-2.56 tarball here, in it, there's a file, ChangeLog.2,
> it contains:
> 
> Fri Mar  8 15:06:48 1996  Roland McGrath  <address@hidden>
> 
>         * acgeneral.m4 (AC_CHECK_LIB): Declare $2 to override gcc2 internal
>         prototype.
> 
>         * Version 2.8 released.

Hm.  This is a bit peculiar.  The document that the reviewer found, and
that caused her to ask about a particular release date, is the one found at
<http://extreme.indiana.edu/%7Ebtemko/autoconf.html>; it's labelled as
being edition 2.8 of the manual, for version 2.8 of Autoconf, and dated
January 1996, a good two months before this release.  I know of plenty of
software whose documentation was written and released after the software
itself, but not too many programs that had documentation before their
release.  ;)

I'm figuring that the reason she's asking is that she's looking for prior
art that would challenge another patent, and in that case, release dates
for documentation are important.  Of course, the release dates for the
software itself should provide more than enough of what she needs: if she's
cutting it so close that January 1996 isn't sufficiently detailed, I would
think knowing that we were releasing very similar versions in 1994 and
earlier should be sufficient for her purposes.  But would anybody happen to
know why these dates don't match up?

I realize I'm effectively asking for 10-year-old geek folklore here, and I
don't at all expect a complete answer.  But for obvious reasons, I would
like there to be as little doubt about all this in her mind as possible.

Thanks again,

-- 
-- Brett Smith

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