Re: Bug Resilience Program of German Sovereign Tech Fund

Karl Berry wrote:
> [...]
>
>      > and reduce technical debt.
>
> I don't know what that means. I instinctively shy away from such
> vague buzzwords.
>   

Essentially, "technical debt" means "stuff on the TODO list" and more 
specifically the accumulation of "good enough for now; fix it later" 
that tends to happen in software projects.

> As for "modernizing" autoconf/make, mentioned in other msgs, that's the
> last thing that should be done. We go to a lot of trouble to make the
> tools work on old systems that no one else supports. For example, I can
> just picture them saying "oh yes, you should use $(...) instead of
> `...`" and other such "modern" shell constructs. Or "use Perl module
> xyz to simplify", where xyz only became available a few years ago. Etc.
>   

If you make them run their patches past the mailing list, I will happily 
complain if they try to break backwards compatibility without a very 
good reason.  Remember Time::HiRes and perl 5.6?  :-)


-- Jacob