release branch patches, ... and m4 problem

[Jochen Kuepper]

Dear Jeff,

thank you for your helpful answers. Still I do have some questions/comments:

:>   > I was thinking it would be nice to have an archive of patches that can be 
:>   > apllied to the last egcs-release, separated from all the patches that can 
:>   > only  be applied to the snapshots.
:> Ah yes.  Did you read the initial message about 1.0.2?  It had this line:
:> 
:>   Right now these are only available on the cvs server; I'll bundle
:>   them up for ftp after I take care of a few more critical fixes.
:> 
:> Which to be more explicit means we'll be providing (via ftp) patches folks
:> can use to turn 1.0.1 into pre-release versions of 1.0.2.  This is also how
:> we handle the 1.0.1 release (look in the snapshots/1.0.1-prerelease dir).

Yes, that's fine. I missed that message - stupid since looking into the archiv
and finding about 10 messages having that _subject_ - sorry.
Still, I initially was wondering wether it is possible to mark some of the
patches that come in during development (at any time, not just now) as
beeing important and reliable enough to call them something like 'release
branch patches' - this should be decided by the same/similar criteria as you
are using for 1.0.2 right know and should happen within one week (maximum two) 
after the patch was submitted.
These patches could be put into their own directory, probably with a short
comment (one sentence / few words) on each.
So people (like me) could go a reasonable safe upgrade path during 'ordinary' 
development times.


:> It's a nice goal, but at some point you have to say "critical fixes only",
:> else we'd have to pull in most of the development tree, which unstabilizes
:> things...
Yep!
You are more arguing for 'critical' where I am thinking about patches that
_fix_ real trouble - I think that's along the same line.


:> 
:>   > Or is all this even possible by just checking out the release tree from 
the
:>   > cvs-sources regularly ?
:> Yes -- if you update your release tree via cvs you'll get whatever patches
:> we've applied to to the release tree.  That's precisely why we install the
:> changes in the release branch -- so folks can get them them at any time.
Are you installing all patches in the release branch or are you doing what I 
just tried to desceibe (v.s.).



Switching context:

I do have GNU m4 v1.4 installed as /usr/local/bin/gm4, Digital Unix m4
installed in /usr/bin/m4. In my PATH /usr/local/bin is first, /usr/bin
comes at the end.

The cvs sources (updated today) complain on compilation that I need to provide
GNU m4 > v1.1, cause it's using the system m4.
Shouldn't it find the gm4 that is in the path before the system m4 that's later 
in the path ?

Thank you very much,
Greetings,
Jochen


-----------------------------------------------------------------------
  Jochen K"upper

  Heinrich-Heine-Universit"at D"usseldorf   jochen@uni-duesseldorf.de
  Institut f"ur Physikalische Chemie I
  Universit"atsstr. 1, Geb 26.43 Raum 02.29    phone ++49-211-8113681
  40225 D"usseldorf                            fax   ++49-211-8115195
  Germany             http://www-public.rz.uni-duesseldorf.de/~jochen
-----------------------------------------------------------------------