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Subject: Re: coreutils refresh request (again)
To: cygwin@cygwin.com
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From: Brian Inglis <Brian.Inglis@SystematicSw.ab.ca>
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Organization: Systematic Software
Message-ID: <25eb3e03-9982-5e50-d40c-f82f3bdb9c57@SystematicSw.ab.ca>
Date: Thu, 4 Jun 2020 07:56:58 -0600
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On 2020-05-31 08:52, Lavrentiev, Anton (NIH/NLM/NCBI) [C] via Cygwin wrote:
> Having upgraded my Cygwin install today, I still see the old coreutils
> package v8.26, from 2016.
> Looks like the current version is now 8.32, released in March this year.
> Can Cygwin please get this updated?

Upgrades, especially of a multi-program package, are not always easy, with many
features added each release, and often bugs, sometimes Cygwin specific.
The volunteer maintainers may have to negotiate with upstream maintainers about
whether they can get bug fixes made upstream, or bug fixes or feature support by
other Cygwin library or package volunteer maintainers, or their upstream
maintainers.

All of these people are busy with work and life: many volunteer, and some also
work, on multiple projects; some may have been or are now sick (hopefully few to
none), or have conditions or illnesses which make them unable to contribute
temporarily.

Some core volunteers on this project also have jobs at RedHat (which supports
the infrastructure) and was bought by IBM, who is once again betting the company
on a new direction, so some volunteers may now have limited or no time for other
projects.
One such volunteer maintainer of over 2500/25% of Cygwin packages has had to
give them all up due to having no time to spare now.

Add to that the current pandemic issues, particularly badly handled in some
major Western countries, and perhaps users could be somewhat patient and
understanding of the situations of volunteer maintainers, who may now be working
remotely, likely overtime to support volumes of issues or scaling.

Developers who are corporate (or personal) users could think of contributing to
the project by maintaining packages they use and are interested in (2500+ are up
for grabs), spreading the load, or get some of their corporate IT development
staff to help them and their organization out by doing upgrades to packages they
need or use, and contributing those upgrades to the project.

The Cygwin cygport package build infrastructure is an extensive and professional
job and takes care of a lot of the upgrade mechanics, but build failures need
thought and work to diagnose and generate a fix, submit patches upstream, decide
whether to wait for an upstream patch to land, or release sooner with a Cygwin
patch, bearing in mind that Cygwin is only a minor volunteer blip in the
otherwise fairly well funded software distribution ecosystem.

-- 
Take care. Thanks, Brian Inglis, Calgary, Alberta, Canada

This email may be disturbing to some readers as it contains
too much technical detail. Reader discretion is advised.
[Data in IEC units and prefixes, physical quantities in SI.]
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