Hi Christoph,
https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/programs/bug-resilience
Thanks for bringing this up.
> Our partner 'Neighbourhoodie Software' provides a variety
> of types of contributions to participating projects to
> address known issues,
If that means providing patches for open bugs, then great.
That is what is needed.
https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/pkgreport.cgi?package=automake
However, going along with what Paul said, I am skeptical that there is
any real chance that someone from "Neighborhoodie Software" knows or
will learn m4 + sh + perl + etc. enough to actually do anything useful.
Looking at https://neighbourhood.ie/areas-of-expertise (assuming that's
the company in question), I see nothing about low-level Unix stuff. Just
current high-level web things.
On the other hand, as you say, spending tax money on free software in
whatever way is better than many other uses, regardless of whether
anything useful comes out of it.
> improve documentation,
I am equally skeptical that that would happen.
> and reduce technical debt.
I don't know what that means. I instinctively shy away from such
vague buzzwords.
As for "modernizing" autoconf/make, mentioned in other msgs, that's the
last thing that should be done. We go to a lot of trouble to make the
tools work on old systems that no one else supports. For example, I can
just picture them saying "oh yes, you should use $(...) instead of
`...`" and other such "modern" shell constructs. Or "use Perl module
xyz to simplify", where xyz only became available a few years ago. Etc.
My biggest concern is that I do not want to spend the little time I have
"explaining" to people, who are supposedly there to help, how these
packages work and what the basic approach is. (And I'm sure that all the
rest of us doing the development feel the same way.) I fear that is
exactly what will happen. --best, karl.
