Problems with USE_AUTOMAKE_VER variable

[Craig Rodrigues]

On Sat, Apr 03, 2004 at 07:36:02PM -0800, Kris Kennaway wrote:
> From time to time infrastructural sweeps need to be made in order to
> keep the ports collection maintainable and in good overall shape.
> Since these are typically minor changes but can affect a lot of ports
> it's often not practical to wait for approval for every maintainer,
> because that blocks the change for weeks and we'd never get anything
> done.

That's fine, and I understand that such infrastructural work needs to
be done.  But would it kill you guys to send an e-mail to the port maintainer
telling them what commits you are doing?  It may not seem like
much to you, but I would consider it common courtesy.  I've
worked with kuriyama@ and lev@ on the apr port, and they have been
very good at giving me the heads up on minor changes that they have done.
I consider the commits done by ade@ and krion@ to be in poor taste...
if they gave me the heads up, maybe I could have helped.

> Committers are expected to test all changes they make, so normally
> this isn't a problem, except when the committer screws up and breaks
> ports.  In this case they are expected to quickly undo their damage;
> I'm not happy that Ade has not done so.  I expect him to test his
> changes better in the future, and to submit patches for testing when
> making changes that have a wide impact.  I'd also like him to help you
> resolve this problem, since it's causing continued pain.

I'm going to have to undo some of these changes, and remove one
of ade@'s patches.  It looks like these autoconf macro changes
have not been fully tested, so I am quite disappointed that these commits
have gone in without anyone telling me about them.  I don't have a commit bit, 
so I can't arbitrarily commit things.

Was there an e-mail sent out to ports@ which explains the rationale
for what is being done here?  If I had been kept informed of what
was going on, instead of being told about things after the fact
by a third party, I wouldn't be so annoyed.

-- 
Craig Rodrigues        
http://crodrigues.org
rodrigc at crodrigues.org