Karl Berry wrote:
[...]> and reduce technical debt. I don't know what that means. I instinctively shy away from such vague buzzwords.
Essentially, "technical debt" means "stuff on the TODO list" and more specifically the accumulation of "good enough for now; fix it later" that tends to happen in software projects.
As for "modernizing" autoconf/make, mentioned in other msgs, that's the last thing that should be done. We go to a lot of trouble to make the tools work on old systems that no one else supports. For example, I can just picture them saying "oh yes, you should use $(...) instead of `...`" and other such "modern" shell constructs. Or "use Perl module xyz to simplify", where xyz only became available a few years ago. Etc.
If you make them run their patches past the mailing list, I will happily complain if they try to break backwards compatibility without a very good reason. Remember Time::HiRes and perl 5.6? :-)
-- Jacob
