Re: Making Autoconf 2.70 happen in the near future

[Zack Weinberg]

On Mon, Mar 9, 2020 at 4:50 PM Bob Friesenhahn
<address@hidden> wrote:>
> On Mon, 9 Mar 2020, Zack Weinberg wrote:
>
> > I’ve seen people suggest that there is a backlog of patches that have
> > been submitted to this mailing list but not reviewed, but considering
> > that there’s already more git commits in between 2.69 and now than
> > there were between 2.68 and 2.69, I think it would be reasonable to
> > call 2.70 feature-complete at this point.  That backlog can become the
> > meat of 2.71. :-)
>
> Without capturing this backlog and taking a look at the issues solved,
> how can you know if current git is reasonably acceptable, or if there
> is a vital issue remaining which is resolved by a patch?
>
> The git commits are more a factor of who has the personal ability to
> make commits than whether the commits are the most important changes
> needed.

What you say is true, but I only have a finite amount of time to put
into this, and I currently think that additional testing will be a
more effective use of that time than finding unreviewed patches within
the past eight years' worth of mailing list archives.  To put it
another way, would you rather see me find unreviewed patches or would
you rather see me run a Debian archive rebuild with a 2.70 release
candidate as /usr/bin/autoconf?

Having said that, if *you* - or anyone else - wants to put some time
into finding unreviewed patches from the mailing list, I wouldn't say
no to the help. I suggest you file a new issue at
https://savannah.gnu.org/support/?group=autoconf for each patch you
find.  It would also be valuable to do this for patches being carried
by Linux distributions and other repackagers.  Please make sure to
check for each patch that there isn't already an issue, and that the
patch isn't already in git (possibly with modifications).

zw