Am 14.03.2011 04:45, schrieb Ade Lovett:

Dear colleagues,

I've been reading this discussion on and off and trying to get on top of the facts to make up my own mind.

Looks like people who have done the work (Ade and Mark) first didn't know the exact implications of non-triviality of the task, and have now become defensive, and Doug has become frustrated about a perceived lack of information -- that I have shared for a couple of days, until the Wiki address crossed my Inbox, possibly for the 2nd time.

I think we all agree that we have learnt a bit from how things happened, and people involved in the frame-work and -exp runs will probably do things differently the next time around.

You all are in what I'd call a violent agreement, and it's naturally easier to criticise with hindsight.

However, please let's quit the defending now and get productive again, and please share information about possible framework breakage sooner.

As much as we would have liked the GNU make maintainers to call this "pick up the shards" release 4.00, this hasn't happened, and we've got to deal with it, and work is underway to achieve just that.

What I've understood is that the first -exp run didn't get us the whole picture and thus the gmake381 hack was added to get an overview and cut the dependency tree short -- but nonetheless it is useful to start the job of fixing gmake 3.82 incompatibilities while 2nd, 3rd, 4th -exp passes proceed. I've also seen that there are volunteers, such as maintainers and unaffiliated contributors who are always willing to lend a hand, have been trying to sort things out for gmake 3.82.

Of course being more transparent and open with information can cause anxiety, but if more people take interest in an issue, things get understood and fixed sooner. The only remaining question is whether a policy needs to be established to do such -exp things openly in general, or if it was just a lack of proactive communication as a one-time event that will not happen again anyways. And I'd rather not overengineer.

Anyways, I see *chance there* for the -exp and autotools and gmake janitors to share a bit of their task "get gmake3.82 in ports to fly" workload on more shoulders.

Best