On Sun, May 1, 2011 at 8:47 PM, Simon Josefsson <si...@josefsson.org> wrote: > How about just removing the module? If something breaks, the maintainer > can track it down, and will notice that the module disappeared, and fix > the package. If nothing breaks, it is normally just a portability > problem that will be noticed eventually when someone builds the package. > The only real danger is if nothing breaks and the resulting code is > insecure as a result. I think that is a rather rare occurance.
I agree. I just tracked down a findutils bug to a change in Autoconf which changed the spelling of a macro[*]. The bug persisted in findutils for 11 years! So I'm all for explicit failures rather than things it's possible to ignore or get wrong by accident. [*] In fairness it was a move from a deprecated Autoconf macro to its documented replacement. The problem was that the C preprocessor macro test should have been changed too, but wasn't. Hence this isn't the fault of Autoconf really. But still I prefer designs that make this unlikely (e.g. explicitly scanning for the obsolete spelling). James.
