Problems with USE_AUTOMAKE_VER variable

[Doug Barton]

Craig Rodrigues wrote:

> 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?  

No, it wouldn't. This has come up many times before, and it's
astonishing to me that some members of the ports team (especially the
portsmgr team) continue to be so disrespectful. There is a difference
between the need to get _approval_ (which I agree could delay needed
changes unnecessarily), and _notice_. In fact, this particular situation
could have been vastly improved if notice had been given since the
changes in question actually broke many ports.

I think that the absolute bare minimum for sweeping changes like this
would be notification to ports@, followed by say 48 hours to give people
a chance to react. Frankly, I don't see how an e-mail to the maintainers
would be that overwhelming a burden either. If you can't figure out how
to extract all the maintainer e-mail addresses from the Makefiles you're
editing and feed them to sendmail, you probably shouldn't be doing
sweeping ports changes.

By telling people what they're doing in advance, I think that certain
members of the ports team may be surprised how much help they get, and
how many good ideas other than their own are out there.

Doug

-- 

	If you're never wrong, you're not trying hard enough