Re: -follow problem in 4.2.18

[James Youngman]

On Mon, Mar 14, 2005 at 07:33:00PM +0100, DervishD wrote:

>     I didn't know that 4.2.19 had been released. I don't use to look
> in alpha.gnu.org O:) My fault.

alpha.gnu.org is for testing releases and other releases which for one
reason or another don't qualify as "stable".  If there are no bug
reports on 4.2.19 for a while I'll make it a stable release and put it
on ftp.gnu.org.

As the maintainer one of my problems is (your heart bleeds, I'm sure)
that nobody ever says "yup, that release looks good, I've tested it to
death on 500 platforms".  Well, actually there is one person who
sometimes does that but it's all dependent on whether he has the time.

Another component of the problem is that the test suite for
"findutils" is quite small and thus doesn't test much of the
functionality.  It also requires "dejagnu", and so most people can't
run the test suite as they don't have it installed.  The more obscure
platforms that really need the testing are the ones on which it's
least likely that people will have installed DejaGnu.  It would have
been better really if the findutils test suite were written in Bourne
shell or even Perl.

Anyway because those releases are not "stable" releases, alpha.gnu.org
releases don't get announced on <address@hidden>.  It's not a secret
location, it's just that nobody wants people to believe they're all
"stable" releases.  However anybody is very welcome to use them.

>     I searched about similar bugs in savannah this morning without
> success, sorry. I thought it had never been reported.

I bet you only searched the unfixed bugs :)

Anyway, there's no need for you to apologise - if anything, I should
apologise for creating the bug!  Thanks for taking an interest in
findutils.

Regards,
James.