4 ms·
Release notes are a bit weird. It's like an author is shy of actual major changes: NAMESPACES and hides them behind mentions of c99 compliance and test infrastr
by indeyets 7y ago
Release notes are a bit weird. It's like an author is shy of actual major changes: NAMESPACES and hides them behind mentions of c99 compliance and test infrastructure :-/
- acqq 7y agoI would rather say “who asked for namespaces in awk”? Who needs that and what’s the point? Any compatibility breakage in awk should start wit “negative points” so what are the positive ones to even qualify it as desired?
- rwbhn 7y agoSee http://www.skeeve.com/awk-sys-prog.html http://www.skeeve.com/awk-sys-prog.html
- billsmithaustin 7y agoSomething I just learned: there is an awk debugger! From the above page: “Beginning with version 4.0 in 2011, gawk provides an awk-level debugger: dgawk, which is modeled after GDB. This is a full debugger, with breakpoints, watchpoints, single statement stepping and expression evaluation capabilities.”
- acqq 7y agoThere are no details there. Just “it’s needed” claim. Brian Kernighan is also cited there, and also not convinced. I’m in a good company, at least.
- Bootvis 7y agoIt seems to have some breaking changes and non-user facing improvements though. I'm not sure major changes are needed but it should allow them more easily now.
- fredsanford 7y agoArnold Robbins is a busy dude. He maintains awk, bash, gnu grep and several other must have packages. A little slack would be nice.
- OskarS 7y agoWow, I had no idea those things were maintained by the same guy! That's amazing! Is there somewhere one can contribute to his development efforts? I guess just donate to GNU Foundation?
- BlackFingolfin 7y agoActually, Chet Ramey maintains GNU Bash, and Jim Meyering maintains GNU Grep. As far as I can tell, Arnold Robbins "just" maintains GNU awk. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to trivialize this at all, just correct the record.
- black-tea 7y agoWait, are you making sure that credit is given correctly? Is it just because Arnold Robbins is a woman? Why the sexism?
- Stratoscope 7y ago> Is it just because Arnold Robbins is a woman? Arnold and his family would be surprised to hear that. https://www.oreilly.com/pub/au/459 https://www.oreilly.com/pub/au/459
- black-tea 7y agoOh.. My bad. I thought he was a woman. No harm done then.
- geofft 7y agoAlso, if one person really did maintain all those things and was overworked, my reaction wouldn't be "Wow, you do so much!" but "Why haven't you found other people to help out so you're not overworked?" All this software is too important to be left to people who don't have time for them.
- clan 7y agoHow so? It is actually one of the very first things mentioned: > This is a major new release, with new or improved features, including namespaces. The relevant part of the NEWS file is appended below. So you would be happier to have the item as number 1 rather than 11 in the list further down? > 11. Namespaces have been implemented! See the manual. One consequence of this is that files included with -i, read with -f, and command line programsegments must all be self-contained syntactic units. E.g., you can no longer do something like this: gawk -e 'BEGIN {' -e 'print "hello" }' I found the announcement rather concise and to the point. Apart from that it would have been nice with a reference to what section of the manual to look at. Especially as https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/ https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/ still references 4.2 (will probably be updated soon).
- vesinisa 7y agoPerhaps the changes were listed in the chronological order of version control history, as is often the case with release notes, as opposed to any subjective notion like significance.