On Wed, 25 May 2005, Charles Swiger wrote:

> Hi--
>
> I'd hate to intrude if you guys intend to argue each other senseless, but 
> there are more and less productive ways of going about anything.
>
> Arguing that a change is better simply because it is "standards compliant" is 
> pretty silly, given how many standards there are to choose from.  A change 
> that causes multiple regressions (I've heard emacs and wget mentioned, as 
> well as lynx) and gets fixed by projects switching to gmake rather than the 
> stock system make probably wasn't a good idea to begin with.
>
> Will this problem go away if someone reverts the Makefile changes so that .h 
> is listed in .SUFFIXES?

We did agree about that (yes).  A redundant .h won't break this case, 
though it's possible that would in turn have some ripple effect.

> Never assume that someone who disagrees with you doesn't know what they are 
> talking about: I'm pretty sure that Thomas Dickey has been working on X11 
> since before Linux was invented.  I don't mean to take sides, here, though: I

not quite.  I've been using Linux since 1994, Unix since 1983.  But before
Linux, my X11 experience was mostly improvements to some widget sets that
aren't part of X11, from around 1990.  "Working on X11" sounds more like
getting changes incorporated in the X distribution.

> didn't see any PR's submitted by "Dickey" in the NetBSD GNATS database, 
> either.

I've offered advice on several, and (don't keep a list) recall sending 
some comments in via the web interface over the past year (after someone 
else said I should report it myself).

iirc, it's only been in about the past year that one can send reports in 
on the web interface, and before, the email interface wasn't useful to me 
since I only setup NetBSD for ports (no email ;-).

> Criticism is pretty cheap, diffs and working code are harder.
> Or am I out of line, wanting to see a little more code and a bit less 
> argument?  :-)

I'm sure it'll be in the next lynx patch (which is overdue - but that's
a different long story: too many interruptions from real life).

-- 
Thomas E. Dickey
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net