On Sun, Dec 20, 2015 at 5:30 PM, Andreas Metzler <g...@bebt.de> wrote: > On 2015-12-18 James Youngman <j...@gnu.org> wrote: >> I'm considering making a stable release (i.e. 4.6.0) of GNU findutils >> in the next few days, essentially identical to the recent 4.5.15 >> release, with a version number change. > >> What are your thoughts on this? Clearly there are a number of open >> bug reports on the bug tracker. However, many bug-fixes have occurred >> across the 4.5.x series, and so perhaps the benefit of the bug fixes >> in the proposed 4.6.0 release outweighs the downside of making a >> stable release with known bugs. > >> What do you think? If you don't think we should make a stable >> release without addressing one of the bugs in the bug tracker, would >> you like to volunteer to work on the issue you identified? > > Hello, > > the status quo, with a very old stable release and a slowly moving > unstable one clearly does not work.
This is, I agree, the outcome. But it is not the plan. There are constraints on my time, and I don't get to spend nearly as much time on findutils as I would like. I believe that with contribution from more volunteers - and by this I mean people making the needed source, test and documentation changes[1] - we could go faster. > A number of Linux distros (e.g. Opensuse and Fedora) have already > moved to 4.5.x. We at Debian are still at 4.4. > > I would consider the outdated gnulib in 4.5.15 a release-blocker, it > fails with perl 5.22 and I guess the build-error on ppc64el > https://buildd.debian.org/status/logs.php?pkg=findutils&ver=4.5.15-1&arch=ppc64el > is also gnulib related. This should be fixed by the release of findutils-4.5.16, which happened a few minutes ago. That was previously blocked by the fact that I wasn't able to successfully import and build that version of gnulib. The problem turned out to be that that version of gnulib was incompatible with gettext version 0.18.x, which was what I was using. But the error messages didn't make this clear. I had asked for help on that a couple of times, without getting any. So the problem was only resolved after my development system's distribution (Debian, fwiw) moved to gettext 0.19. Thanks, James. [1] those changes would of course need to be made via the normal GNU copyright assignment process, which can be a one-time thing for those who prefer that option.
