>>>>> "Olly" == Olly Betts <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Olly> I hesitate to criticise the valiant efforts of the maintainers,
Olly> but this does appear to be a general problem with autoconf. I
Olly> don't feel I'm using autoconf in advanced ways, but I seem to
Olly> end up having to use CVS versions most of the time. Perhaps
Olly> minor releases with just bug fixes would help here?
I share your opinion, but I'm somewhat more optimistic.
What is currently happening is a walk-through in Autoconf, and almost
every single macro is rethought, trying to factor common things,
improve the base layer, uniformize the quoting system, standardize the
prototypes etc.
Therefore it is true that the release 2.15 is delayed more than it
should have been. We could decree a feature freeze now, but I don't
think it is right, we should do that only once we're done with the
base layer.
I must confess I am not really interested in fixing deep problems in
acspecific and the like. There is urgency in acgeneral, and once we
have a cute acgeneral, we should spread it, so that people can use it.
Worse: I am even a bit frightened when there are patches submitted for
acspecific that suggest to change a proto somewhere, because this
commits our future. There is nothing more important in Autoconf than
uniformity. There is nothing more painful than macros with are
different from the other for free, especially when they use the
`right' name.
So, yes, I share your opinion, Autoconf 2.15 is overdue. OTOH, this
is probably the last time there will be such delays.
Akim
