Re: Concerns about GNU Bison maintenance.

[Alfred M. Szmidt]

What Jose mentioned, but also -- this all reads as if the GNU Bison
maintainer is doing an excellent job adding new features and moving
Bison forward.  There is no obligation in keeping backward
comptability for ever -- indeed, the directive has been marked
obsolete for over 10 years!

If you are required to use a 10 year old version of Bison, then the
best thing to do is to commit the generated files into VCS -- this is
really no different than for GNU Autoconf/Automake.

It also seems that the maintainer is _very_ quick to fix issues, it
would be an impossible task to ask maintainers to test every single
version released on every single GNU/Linux system.  Not only that, but
Ubuntu is a non-free GNU/Linux system, and our priorities are for 100%
free GNU/Linux systems.

You mention POSIX, but we do not follow POSIX slavishly.  We are quite
free to ignore what it says.  Even so, GNU Bison does implement it to
the limits it makes sense.

Overall, I think your characterization is unfair, the maintainer
acknowledges the pain you are experiencing, is trying to find a way
forward and is doing excellent work on making GNU bison better and
better for each release.

   Lastly, it think it may be a good idea for at least every major release
   of Bison to be regression tested by building several GNU/Linux
   distributions from scratch with it.  A distro build is a great test
   suite for a toolchain component. If that is available, why would you
   only rely on the tool's own limited suite when releasing?

Such an infrastructure would not solve the build issue experienced
here, we cannot host Ubuntu in good conscious since that would work
against our goals of creating fully free systems.

It would also take time from the maintainer to keep this
infrastructure up, time that I think we all can agree is better spent
working on GNU Bison proper.  But I am sure that if you'd like to set
this up, and test versions of Bison as they either come out, or are
nearing release that those results would be very welcome.  

The GNU project is wholy dependant on volunteers doing the work needed
for things to become better.