On Sat, Mar 09, 2002 at 04:33:20PM +0100, Matthias Welwarsky wrote:
 > > The credibility of the release policies are further damaged by the
> > > manner in which the decisions are made.  For instance, the major
> > > change to libtool, there was a minimum of discussion, with no
> > > compelling bugs or reasons shown for making this drastic change.
> >
> > There were always major changes in the build system before a release
> > to overcome certain platform incompatibilities.
> >
> 
> This is no excuse at all. It was bad then, and it is bad now. But developers
> will accept even late change if you give them time to make themselves familiar
> with it. And all it takes is a proper annoucement with some sentences about the
> reason. The whole "discussion" as you call it, took place on kde-core-devel
> within 3 (!) mails: The announcement from Michael Matz, then one mail from Andy
> Fawcett who *doubted* that it was the proper time to change a core component of
> the build system right now, and one mail from Stephan Kulow who gave a
> technical reason why the change was needed. That was last Thursday!
>
> How many people, do you think, actually read this mail? How many realized that
> this libtool patch will break their build system? The original announcement did
> not contain the slightest hint that it would break the current build system.
> Man, what did you think would happen?

How many people do you think would have downloaded and applied Michael's 
patch to test it? :)


Simon