Subject: Re: Automake 1.4l released
From: Tom Tromey <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Cc: [email-masked], Bernard Dautrevaux <[email-masked]>, "'Tim Van Holder'" <[email-masked]>, [email-masked]
Date: 14 Aug 2001 19:04:11 -0600

>>>>> "Chris" == Christopher Faylor <[email-masked]> writes:

Chris> 1) New version of automake is released with no Cygwin testing
Chris> for an important feature.

True.  As far as I know nobody ever tried `make distcheck' on Cygwin
before.  In fact this is the first time I've heard of anybody using
Cygwin as their primary maintainer platform for an automake-using
project.

Historically Cygwin has not been an important host platform for
Automake.  That seems to be changing though.

Chris> 3) Cygwin people provide workaround which is rejected.

The original suggestion was "disable the feature".
I'd prefer not to do that.

Chris> AFAICT, the rationale for this stance is that Cygwin is a free
Chris> software project and therefore we should just drop everything
Chris> and fix "our bug" if we want automake to work.

Please don't put words in my mouth.  Of course I don't think you
should drop anything for this problem.  If it is a bug, which I don't
even know for certain, then my preference would be that you prioritize
it along with all the other things that you prioritize.

Chris> Or, possibly, we're supposed to provide a detailed rationale on
Chris> why it isn't possible to fix this in Windows.

Or maybe you could choose not to care that `cp -p' doesn't work.

Chris> This seems to ignore the fact that people are using older
Chris> versions of Cygwin.  Is it automake policy to tell people to
Chris> update to newer OS versions when there are problems with
Chris> automake that can be traced to an OS fault?  Or, perhaps a
Chris> better example would be, Does the automake group tell people to
Chris> upgrade their libc.so when an incompatibility is detected?

Do you really think I would answer yes to any of these?

If I made you angry, then I'm sorry.  I have to say I'm surprised
though.  I thought I made my desire clear in my post.  For instance, I
said I would consider a workaround in automake as well as preferring
that a real fix be made upstream, either in Cygwin or `cp' as
appropriate.  Maybe you prefer otherwise.

Tom

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