Re: [OT] Guido Draheim vs. Peter Simons vs. Rest of the World

[Guido Draheim]

Peter Simons schrieb:
> Another statement that we can actually verify. The complete list of
> macros which are found on the SourceForge "branch" and _not_ in the
> GNU archive is:
>
>     ac_func_vsnprintf.m4
>     ac_lib_readline.m4
>     ac_prog_cc_warnings.m4
>     ac_prog_fig2dev.m4
>
>         All of these macros are duplicates. The author asked me to
>         rename them to vl_<macro_name> to avoid conflicts with the
>         "ac" prefix. I replaced them with the new versions, but your
>         download scripts unfortunately didn't notice that.

They did. And I was embaressed since this deletion BROKE some
projects of mine. I did talk to VL via e-mail how that came to
be and he later stated that he was not aware the macros were
used so widely that renaming could be a problem. The `acinclude`
tool is all about using some machinery to be uptodate with
extra macros but the acinclude tool is not intelligent enough to
detect renames. As a result, I did change my sync-scripts to skip
these files and to _not_ tell me they are deleted. Instead, I
did modify these old entries with a line saying "obsoleted", and
modified the acinclude tool to detect this extra line, and to
warn the `acinclude` user about the fact and hint them to the
name of the new macro. I need to add here that I did not cvs
commit those "additions of obsolete markers" to the sfnet cvs,
you can only see them in the tarballs or the formatted webpage
content on the sfnet site.

One might say that such a deletion/renaming was a bit careless
about the `acinclude` tool, and the problem of automatic
updates of extra macros and project management with locally
instealled copies of the ac-archive macros. - but actually there
is no such tool in the gnu branch, so that it can be guilty
as ammunition in a flame war ;-) just be noted that I was
not amused, as it meant some extra work for me to get away
with it and still have means to have auto-sync with the gnu
repository. It took some time but it is now in place.

-- cheers, guido