Re: another gnulib update

[Gary V. Vaughan]

Hi gnulibers, Eric,

On 23 Feb 2007, at 09:05, Eric Blake wrote:
> Eric Blake <ebb9 <at> byu.net> writes:
>
> > > Gnulib just enhanced <string.h> to guarantee GNU properties,  
> > > obsoleting
> > several
> > > minor headers in the process.
>
> Another gnulib update during my 2-week vacation got rid of exit.h.   
> At this
> point, because of the number of extensive gnulib changes, I'm  
> thinking of
> releasing m4 1.4.8b to alpha.gnu.org, and soliciting build sanity  
> checks prior
> to formally releasing 1.4.9.

For this reason, and for the difficulty of reboot-strapping old releases
of gnulib using projects, I find the anti-release model of gnulib  
somewhat
depressing.  It would be nice for gnulib to make occasional feature  
freezes,
or release branches, or to maintain stable and development branches, or
otherwise to provide time for testing and stabilizing some version of  
the
gnulib codebase every now and again.

This way it would be possible to recreate an old M4 release tarball  
from a
CVS snapshot.  I don't think tracking changes to gnulib maintained  
files in
the M4 CVS tree is a sensible solution, and nor does that solve the  
problem
of needing to keep up with sometimes radical gnulib changes in the  
face of
trying to prepare for a release of a project that uses gnulib.

Perhaps M4 should release `gnulib-for-m4-1.4.9.tar.gz' in parallel with
`m4-1.4.9.tar.gz' to mitigate that, maybe taking a snapshot of the  
gnulib
tree as a starting point a few weeks before the release, and  
incorporating
only bugfixes for the modules M4 cares about between the gnulib snapshot
and the M4 release?  But that feels ugly compared to doing that kind of
release maintenance inside the gnulib project.  How do other gnulib  
client
projects solve this problem?

Cheers,
        Gary
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