Release Autoconf 2.70

[Craig Andrews]

There have been a number commits made to autoconf since 2.69 was
released on April 24, 2012. FWIW, I'm particularly interested in the
runstatedir change.

Is it possible to make a 2.70 release in the near future? If not, what's
blocking a release?

Thanks,
~Craig

[Eric Blake]

Post by Craig Andrews
There have been a number commits made to autoconf since 2.69 was
released on April 24, 2012. FWIW, I'm particularly interested in the
runstatedir change.
Is it possible to make a 2.70 release in the near future? If not, what's
blocking a release?

Lack of free time from someone with commit rights.

[Zack Weinberg]

Post by Eric Blake

Post by Craig Andrews
There have been a number commits made to autoconf since 2.69 was
released on April 24, 2012. FWIW, I'm particularly interested in the
runstatedir change.
Is it possible to make a 2.70 release in the near future? If not, what's
blocking a release?

Lack of free time from someone with commit rights.

I'm also interested in seeing a release in the near future. Is there
any way people without commit rights (e.g. me) can help?

zw

[Gavin Smith]

Post by Zack Weinberg
I'm also interested in seeing a release in the near future. Is there
any way people without commit rights (e.g. me) can help?

The obvious answer would be for you to get commit rights. Hopefully
you could agree with the Autoconf maintainers what had to be done
before a release, so you could do this work. If they didn't trust you
to do this work then you could do it on a different branch within the
revision control system to give them a chance to review it. If the
existing Autoconf maintainers don't even have time for that, then
really it needs new maintainers. That's my opinion, anyway.

[Marko Lindqvist]

Post by Eric Blake

Post by Craig Andrews
what's
blocking a release?

Lack of free time from someone with commit rights.

How much time it takes to make a release? For the outsider there's
not many obviously needed steps that take a lot of time. Does making a
RC take as much time as full release, or could we have RC for testing
both autoconf and the build systems of projects that use it?


- ML

[Eric Blake]

Post by Marko Lindqvist

Post by Eric Blake

Post by Craig Andrews
what's
blocking a release?

Lack of free time from someone with commit rights.

How much time it takes to make a release? For the outsider there's
not many obviously needed steps that take a lot of time. Does making a
RC take as much time as full release, or could we have RC for testing
both autoconf and the build systems of projects that use it?

The biggest time sink is digging through the mail archives to ensure
that all posted patches that are still relevant have been applied; I
know that there is a big body of work for detecting compiler warnings
that needs to be reviewed and incorporated.

[Julien ÉLIE]

Hi Erik,

Post by Eric Blake

Post by Marko Lindqvist
How much time it takes to make a release? For the outsider there's
not many obviously needed steps that take a lot of time. Does making a
RC take as much time as full release, or could we have RC for testing
both autoconf and the build systems of projects that use it?

The biggest time sink is digging through the mail archives to ensure
that all posted patches that are still relevant have been applied; I
know that there is a big body of work for detecting compiler warnings
that needs to be reviewed and incorporated.

As far as I understand, there already are useful changes that have been
committed to Autoconf source repository since its latest release.
So why not just release Autoconf 2.70 as-is? And then keep uncommitted
patches for another future release?

I would personally be interested in a release of Autoconf 2.70 with
updated config.sub and config.guess helper scripts. As a matter of
fact, there are recent systems where I cannot configure Autoconf because
of obsolete config.{sub,guess}; I then need to manually update them
before configuring Autoconf.

[Mike Frysinger]

Post by Julien ÉLIE
I would personally be interested in a release of Autoconf 2.70 with
updated config.sub and config.guess helper scripts. As a matter of
fact, there are recent systems where I cannot configure Autoconf because
of obsolete config.{sub,guess}; I then need to manually update them
before configuring Autoconf.

config.{sub,guess} freshness is irrelevant to autoconf. any sane distro
already ships them independently and their build systems update them even
w/out regenerating autotools.
-mike