Re: Datamash admin

[Erik Auerswald]

Hi Tim,

On Fri, May 13, 2022 at 09:31:07PM +0000, Tim Rice wrote:
> [...]
> I guess the first task on my plate will be to roll a new release to
> consolidate any improvements made since 2020. (With 20/20 hindsight,
> I should have gotten this rolling a few months ago so we could get
> v1.8 into Ubuntu Jammy. Oh well.)

I'd like to thank you for volunteering for this! :-)

The git repository contains five commits since the v1.7 tag from April
2020.  The latest commit from January 2021 updates gnulib, which might
already help with the problem reported in
<https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-datamash/2022-03/msg00000.html>.
The Red Hat bug report traced the problem to lib/error.h from gnulib.
Only copyright text changes have been applied to this file after the
gnulib update in the datamash git repository.  But I cannot test this,
since the problem occurred only on little-endian PPC 64-bit systems
after changing long double to be _Float128, but I have neither such
a PPC system nor do I use Fedora 36 where the problem was introduced.

Then there was a report of a build failure due to a compiler warning
combined with -Werror on armv7hl in
<https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-datamash/2022-01/msg00003.html>.
I have suggested two possible ways to fix this by using either %jd or
PRIdMAX instead of %zu for printing the intmax_t variable in
<https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-datamash/2022-01/msg00004.html>.
I'd use the second patch with PRIdMAX, because PRIuMAX is already used
in the code, but %ju is not.  While I would call this fix "obviously
correct", I cannot test it, because I do not have a system where this
warning is reported.  Still I think it may be worthwhile to consider
including a fix for this in a new release.  This might even be related
to Debian bug 982869, but this is not obvious to me and I cannot test
it (see <https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=982869>).

Perhaps members from the platform-testers@gnu.org mailing list can help
testing the above issues.  This mailing list is mentioned at the bottom
of <https://www.gnu.org/software/devel.html>, the list info is at
<https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/platform-testers>.

I have previously sent a few patches to the bug-datamash mailing list,
mostly trivial documentation fixes.  Perhaps you would like to look at
them and include some in a new release?  I have collected my patches
on <https://www.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/~auerswal/datamash/>.  That web page
also provides links to the archived mailing list messages with the
patches if you would like to reply to one of those.

HTH,
Erik
-- 
The right tool for the job is often the tool you are already using -
adding new tools has a higher cost than many people appreciate.
                        -- John Carmack