Hi Karl,
given Automake is facing a lack of contributors and still being an
important part of software like GCC or LibreOffice, we should reach out
for help!
The German Sovereign Tech Fund offers a Bug Resilience Program [1]. They
offer "Direct Contributions", i.e.:
> Our partner 'Neighbourhoodie Software' provides a variety
> of types of contributions to participating projects to
> address known issues, improve documentation, and reduce
> technical debt. Very often, FOSS projects maintainers
> know that certain parts of critical technologies on
> which they work contain vulnerabilities or security
> deficiencies. However, the maintainers may not have the
> capacity to deal with them yet […].
I think Automake fulfills the formal criteria. If you want, I can apply
for Autotools. We can discuss this here or off-list.
I am a German citizen and I would love to see Automake / you helped over
where my tax-payer money is usually spent.
[1] https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/programs/bug-resilience
Bye
Christoph
Am 15.05.24 um 03:18 schrieb Karl Berry:
Hi Christoph,
end of 2023 you shared the news that automake release 1.17 could happen
Indeed. Unfortunately since then I have had to attend to other priority
projects, and there's no one else driving automake. I hope to be able to
spend some time on automake again soon to bring the release to fruition.
I have no ETA though, as ever. Sorry.
There has been no public communication for the last couple of
weeks.
Well, I (or someone) is still replying to questions and bugs on
automake@gnu.org and bug-autom...@gnu.org. Not about the release,
though, granted.
What are your plans regarding 1.17?
Release as soon as possible.
Are there blockers?
Yes. The last pretest in December turned up at least one:
https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=68808
It requires hacking a function in sanity.m4 to probe make for its
"subsecond mtime" behavior.
There may be others, I'd have to look at the recent pending bugs.
Is there anything we as the community can help?
Well, a patch for the bug above would certainly be helpful.
Patches in general for any other bugs, especially the recent ones, would
be all to the good.
Other than actual patches, reviewing the other recent pending bugs to
see if any others are important enough to require fixing before the
release, or simple enough to just fix and be done with it, would also be
helpful. (I know there are a few other patches simply waiting for me to
review and install.)
Beyond that, three years ago I wrote a message requesting more
volunteers. The information is (sadly enough) still current:
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/automake/2021-03/msg00018.html
Thanks,
Karl
P.S. BTW, did something happen somewhere that prompted you to send this?
I ask because another person wrote me off-list today with the same
question. Seems a bit much for coincidence.
