[HEADS UP] GNU make 3.82

[Ade Lovett]

On Mar 12, 2011, at 20:30 , Doug Barton wrote:
> The real problem here is that there is a very tiny subset of FreeBSD developers who insist on taking on a disproportionate amount of "behind the scenes" responsibilities, and are incredibly resistant to allowing anyone else into the inner circle.

The "inner circle" in this case would be autotools@ - whilst not a true mailing list, anyone can ask to be added to the alias, just in the same way as we have x11@ and so on.  You'll notice also the port in question has autotools@ as its maintainer, not an individual committer.

The very nature of infrastructural ports, ie: those in which a change can have wide-ranging effects across the tree are such that they take "disproportionate" amounts of time and effort to improve.  Even with vastly improved package building clusters, it can easily take 4 or more full runs to iron out all the issues.  That's just the way it is.

Handling such ports also _very_ quickly engenders, rightly or wrongly, a specific way of doing things, otherwise they just don't ever get done.  If a few ruffled feathers is the collateral damage for keeping things (vaguely) sane and up to date, then, quite frankly, so be it.  It really is as simple as that.

-aDe