change in behavior of make from 3.80 to 3.81

[William A. Hoffman]

At 05:27 AM 8/16/2006, Dave Korn wrote:
>On 15 August 2006 20:56, William A. Hoffman wrote:
>
>> So, in this case, for
>> those that want the old way of things to work, there is no amount of "work"
>> they can do to make that happen.  
>
>  Blatantly untrue.  Here is a VERY simple recipe you can follow to make it
>work again:

Not so untrue, the old way was run setup and get the most current version
of make.  That clearly no longer works.


>1)  Use setup.exe to roll back your current make version to 3.80-1
>2)  To make sure this doesn't ever get overwritten by a newer version even if
>you want to upgrade the rest of your cygwin installation, you can edit
>/etc/setup/installed.db; change the version number in the entry for make to
>something ridiculous, like 9999.9999-9; setup.exe will always think your
>installed version is newest.
>
>or:
>
>1)  Use setup.exe to install the source package to 3.80-1.
>2)  Compile and install it with a --prefix setting that places it earlier in
>your $PATH (e.g. /usr/local instead of /usr).
>3)  (Optional) Use setup.exe to uninstall the cygwin make package altogether.
>
>
>  Trivial.  Elementary.  Easy.  Simple.  Take you ten minutes.  Twenty if you
>aren't used to compiling source packages and have to try it a couple of times.

Sure, that will work for now.  But when 3.82 comes out 3.80-1 will go away
and become hard to get.   Also, it is not just for me.  It is for users of my
open source software.   The instructions used to be, install cygwin, get the
make program, and build.   Now it is install cygwin, make sure you get 3.80-1 version
of make.  And when that goes away the instructions will be get make and patch it
yourself.  

So, there seem to be three options on the table:

- pay redhat to put the patch back
- maintain your own version of make, that is separate from cygwin.
- have the patch made part of the upstream gnu make

The point I am trying to make is that the one option that is off the table,
is taking over the maintenance of the make package in cygwin and doing
the patch yourself.   So, even if a volunteer stepped up and offered to
take the burden off the current maintainer, the offer to do the work
would be rejected.  The other option of creating a separate make package
that has the patch has also been rejected.  

I am sure you can see that it would be better for people that depend
on this feature if it were part of cygwin.   

-Bill


--
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/