On Mar 12, 2011, at 17:22 , b. f. wrote: >> On Fri, Mar 11, 2011 at 09:14:50PM -0800, Doug Barton wrote: >>> There are way too many things happening "in private" around here and >>> the only way to solve that problem is to open the doors. >> >> Would you please offer examples of decisions that you feel that way about? > > We need not look any farther than this episode to see an example of > how things could have been handled better. I don't think that the > course of action that was ultimately adopted was unreasonable, but did > we have to wait from the 8 October, when I filed > ports/151312
I quote from the PR log: State-Changed-From-To: open->suspended State-Changed-By: ade State-Changed-When: Fri Oct 8 16:40:29 UTC 2010 State-Changed-Why: gnu make 3.81 -> 3.82 is, sadly, exceptionally non-trivial. A number of features present in releases prior to 3.82 are technically "wrong", and this release has corrected them. A _lot_ of stuff breaks. It will be looked at, but don't hold your breath. Plenty of other stuff was happening in autotools-land at the time. We had already run a previous preliminary analysis of gmake 3.81->3.82 and it was _not_ pretty. That update to the PR took just a little under 2 hours from initial submission. Suggesting that it took until March 11th is disingenuous at _best_ > to learn what was actually broken by the change, so that we could > begin to fix it? This requires multiple -exp runs. A number of ports that failed with 3.81->3.82 have a non-trivial number of ports that depend on them. Simply taking the first set of breakage does _not_ present the entire picture. Short term hacks, such as allowing those ports to build with 3.81 are _required_ in order to fully understand the depth of the situation. Infrastructure work is a painful experience. Throwing out a PR with "exp-run probably desirable" is not particularly useful, and shows a certain naivety when it comes to such wide-ranging changes. It is a highly iterative procedure, requiring many man- and cpu-hours of work. Those of us that do it may not be doing the best possible job, but there's a distinct lack of volunteers to actually run the process. Behind closed doors, and in the Cabal Club, of course. *sigh* -aDe _______________________________________________ freebsd-ports@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-ports To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-ports-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
