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 :-/
A little slack would be nice.
Sadly it does not rain maintainers everywhere, especially when the role does not pay.
> 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" }'
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/ still references 4.2 (will probably be updated soon).
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?
Brian Kernighan is also cited there, and also not convinced.
I’m in a good company, at least.