Hey thanks for the kind words y'all.
Honestly credit mostly goes to the folks who checked in unreleased changes and submitted patches over the last few years; but I'm glad to have given it the last push.
I absolutely encourage package maintainers out there to reach out with any patches that they have needed to apply to the source tarballs over the last few years. I've been handling a few Nixpkgs ones myself in side branches ( still testing and working out kinks ) since that's my daily driver.
As for CI style testing that's been my main focus over the last few months, but those are external to tye repository obviously. I will summarize some of that progress in another email. Essentially I've got Hydra kicking again and I'm expanding a matrix of versions for autoconf, automake, gcc, make, m4, binutils-gdb, and various other alternatives to test against.
I am manually testing Darwin, Debian, and CentOS periodically, but Hydra can easily start driving the Linux ones in VMs. Once I have a workflow for Linux VMs on Hydra I think I'll add instructions for distro maintainers to plug their ISO in to test with the matrix of dependencies. Under the hood Nix is just using Qemu, so really the Nix parts could be stripped away eventually to make it more accessible.
An important one I want to get automated is testing FreeBSD Coreutils as an input to account for my own blind spots, since I'm so used to the GNU flags and quirks.
Really I want to get the test suite/CI automated to the point that contributors and myself can experiment more freely without having to "just know" the millions of platform, distro, and tool specific oddities that they might inadvertently break with a patch. Obviously there's always going to be a need to manually test some systems, but having more immediate feedback where we can could make the tool much easier to extend.
> On 31 Mar 2022, at 21:42, Richard Purdie <richard.purdie@linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> It was great to see a libtool release, thanks for that!
>
> I upgraded Yocto Project to it in time for our LTS release:
>
> https://git.yoctoproject.org/poky/commit/?id=ff7b41573842a403c81f58bee41fc8163a9d7754
>
> so far things seem reasonable, we've had a few minor issues but they're not
> really libtool's fault or concern. One interesting quirk was that the shell
> script optimisation changes made between 2.4.6 and 2.4.7 resulted in very long
> (6,000+ character) pathnames being passed to the C library functions. This upset
> our fakeroot emulation but we've fixed that to workaround the issue.
>
Nice and smooth so far as well here.
> Yocto Project is carrying a few patches. I did clean them up and shared many of
> them in October:
>
> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/libtool-patches/2021-10/msg00012.html
>
> Some are more important than others and there what I believe are good bug fixes
> in there. My questions:
>
> a) Is there a possibility these could be considered for merging?
>
> [snip]
>
Thanks for asking this and am wondering the same thing. Hoping for your patches
to get in (as Yocto's needs often align with ours) and then I plan on revisiting
our (Gentoo's) stack.
> Thanks,
> Richard
Best,
sam