On Wed, Feb 14, 2007 at 10:03:27AM +0600, Aleksey Demakov wrote: > >The latest is the greatest. They contain less bugs. The current automake > >files in dotgnu clearly show that people try to workaround bugs which > >obviously are not even documented enough that anybody remembers why the > >workarounds are there :-) > > The grim reality is that the latest may contain less old and well known > bugs but every now and then it contains new bugs waiting for incautious > developer in the dark.
For automake/autoconf? Please provide examples. We use the autotools quite extensively and I don't remember having seen real problems with recent versions (other than the usual things like not destdir aware libtool, but that's no regression, as it never worked). > E.g. in gcc 4.1 they broke __builtin_frame_address() that worked > perfectly well in 3.x and 4.0. And we had to work around this problem. Please point me to the bugzilla entries you've filed for this problem; I cannot find it in the gcc bugzilla (http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla). Without knowing the details: a quick search on google showed the following thread: http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2006-06/msg00024.html and especially this one http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2006-06/msg00096.html makes me think that they fixed undefined behaviour there (although I'm no expert in this area and it better has to be discussed with the gcc people). > > Golden Rule of Open Source (TM): If something doesn't work and you > > are using an old version, use the latest and greatest and your > > problems might magically go away. > > The Golden Rule of software in general - free, open source. and > proprietary alike is: > > If it ain't broken, don't fix it. Open Source is about making things better over the time, which comes out of the experience that good OSS projects with critical mass care about problems and fix them. At least our experience is that staying with old versions instead of following the pace is not productive, because if for example the GCC maintainers broke something, we should tell them, and if they didn't, we probably made something wrong ourselfs and should learn what it is. The autotools have a long history of being bashed for having problems, and IMHO today much of the bad publicity comes from people using old versions. The autotool maintainers have worked hard to make things better, so just ignoring this is something I cannot follow. > The same way I may ask you if you have any arguments *for* the version > you mentioned. And the "latest and greatest" argument does not > qualify. Well, it may come from us usually working in the communities of the "big" OSS projects out there, like Linux, gcc, glibc, uclibc, busybox etc. You simply don't get any community support there for anything else than the latest and greatest, because that's all an open source community can handle. > It is purely a matter of personal taste whether you prefer "latest and > gretest" or "old and proven." And I am not going to discuss iif any > one of these approaches is inherently better than the other. This > would be an absolutely pointless discussion. If that's a political statement which reflects the position of the dotgnu developers we can stop the discussion here and I'll spend my time for better things, because it's really pointless. I don't start hunting bugs which may be long solved, just because it is not allowed to update to that versions being supported by the maintainers of the involved OSS projects (which is only the latest and greatest). > I agree that we may scrap the support for that old version of > autotools you found those ugly workarounds for. This is absolutely ok > with me. But asking everyone to upgrade to the latest version is too > much. So please define a well defined version set. I already said that I don't have a problem to use the versions you guys want to have - it just has to be defined. Robert -- Dipl.-Ing. Robert Schwebel | http://www.pengutronix.de Pengutronix - Linux Solutions for Science and Industry Handelsregister: Amtsgericht Hildesheim, HRA 2686 Hannoversche Str. 2, 31134 Hildesheim, Germany Phone: +49-5121-206917-0 | Fax: +49-5121-206917-9 _______________________________________________ Developers mailing list [email protected] http://dotgnu.org/mailman/listinfo/developers
