How to help the GNU Autoconf Macro Archive (was: License notices)

[Peter Simons]

Bastiaan,

I see that you are trying to be a voice of reason. I'll
listen.

You wrote:

 > Sigh. If you don't want any help or input from others,
 > you can say so and do whatever you want.

I want help from other people, it's just that the things
they have been trying to do are not helping. Debating with
Tom whether he could please just do what I asked him to took
several hours. Editing the @license tags myself took 30
minutes.

If we have to debate every little detail as if it were a
life-and-death decision, then we won't get anything done!


 > If you accept help, care for the needs of your users
 > (which I think you do) and want to make collaboration a
 > success, good communication in both directions is a
 > prerequisite.

I'll make a start then. What the archive _really_ needs is
volunteers who maintain the contents. We have the following
tasks at hand:

 (1) Identify obsolete and/or broken macros and add the
     @obsoleted tag with an appropriate description.

 (2) Try to contact those submitters again who didn't
     respond to the request to re-license their macro yet.

 (3) Make sure all macros that have the same author have the
     same @author tag also! I've been fixing lots of them,
     but there are still people who are listed with
     different spellings and e-mail addresses. I'd like to
     provide a macros-by-author index, that won't work
     unless the data is consistent.

 (4) Edit the contents so that it passes aclocal(1) without
     warnings about improper quoting.

 (5) Contact the authors of macros that do not follow the
     AX_ prefix guideline and ask them to change that. If
     they don't care, offer to change it for them. Then make
     a new entry and obsolete the old one.

 (6) Go through the repository and check the macros'
     categorizations. Make suggestions which new categories
     we should add, then identify the macros that belong
     into this category and add @category keywords.

 (7) Identify macros that serve the same purpose. We have a
     dozen macros that detect Python, for instance. Figure
     out which one works best, contact the authors if you
     have to, try to find a way to ensure that the archive
     has only _one_ macro for every purpose to reduce
     confusion.

 (8) Add @summary to those macros that don't have one yet.

 (9) Respond to people who send patches or new macros and
     see to it that their submission finds its way into the
     CVS repository.

That's just what I can think of off-the-cuff, there is
probably a lot more.

Peter