Re: License pedantry

[Ian Beckwith]

Hi,

Sorry about the delay replying.

On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 10:08:01PM +0200, Bruno Haible wrote:
> Welcome! It was a bit unfortunate that gnulib was "frozen" in Debian for
> about a year, although gnulib attempts to be constantly moving and
> improving. See
>   http://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/manual/html_node/Steady-Development.html

I'm planning uploading roughly monthly snapshots to the debian
unstable distribution, However, due to the way debian release
management works, once a package reaches the stable distribution, it
can only be updated to fix security problems.

This means that although users of the unstable and testing
distributions will have a pretty up to date gnulib, users of the
stable distribution will have a version that is potentially quite out
of date.

> If you want to add value to gnulib, compared to the git repository, you
> might want to periodically update to a stable snapshot of gnulib. This means,
> for example, once in a month, take a snapshot of gnulib, then for a week
> watch closely all patches that go into gnulib's git repository, looking out
> for riskless fixes. Then publish a tarball with these fixes. This would
> be added value in terms of reliability/quality, because despite our efforts
> to not break the gnulib git, sometimes a particular module is broken for a
> day or two.

OK. I'll definitely do this when its time for the stable debian
release, and I'll give it a try monthly and see how it goes. I'm
cautious of committing long-term to monthly stable snapshots until I
know how much time it involves.

> Also, I see in http://packages.debian.org/lenny/gnulib that the formal
> dependencies listed in gnulib/DEPENDENCIES (make, autoconf, automake,
> bison, gperf etc.) are not listed among the Debian dependencies. These
> tools are all needed in order to execute "gnulib-tool --create-testdir"
> of the whole module set.

Thanks, I'll fix this in the next version.

Ian.

-- 
Ian Beckwith - address@hidden - http://erislabs.net/ianb/
GPG fingerprint: AF6C C0F1 1E74 424B BCD5  4814 40EC C154 A8BA C1EA

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