On 7/15/05, Keith M Wesolowski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > It's fine to suggest that the makefiles should be fixed; I agree with > that worthy goal. In many cases, however, it's not worth the effort, > especially if the upstream maintainers won't accept the changes. In > these cases it doesn't really matter that GNU make is the world's > worst piece of software; the fact is that fooinator, which has many > large complex makefiles and maintainers who do not care about making > them portable, expects gmake to be used and documents this assumption. > Why should we treat that any differently than some other dependency, > perhaps one on libjpeg? Sure, we could go through and replace all the > JPEG code with its libpng equivalent out of our hypothetical belief > that PNG is better than JPEG and libjpeg is a pile, but is it really > worth doing?
+1 - Completely agree This is my worst fear realised when it comes to trying to "make everything correct". I learned a long time ago when working across different software projects that it really didn't ultimately matter if something was non-portable or correct. Unless I had control over the situation and it was worth spending time on making those things portable instead of fixing or enhancing the project there was no point. Fighting upstream is a fruitless venture that will only end in hours of wasted time. It's better to make only the changes necessary to build at the bare minimum or real fixes and enhancements. If the portability or correctness issue actually becomes a problem, then at that point it's time to fork. I often run into the same problem with Software that I package to run on production servers for the company I work for. -- Shawn Walker, Software and Systems Analyst [EMAIL PROTECTED] - http://binarycrusader.blogspot.com/ _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
