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Re: RE : Re: Files from gnulib


From: Eli Zaretskii
Subject: Re: RE : Re: Files from gnulib
Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2011 10:33:40 -0500

> From: Jim Meyering <address@hidden>
> Cc: Bastien ROUCARIES <address@hidden>,  address@hidden,  address@hidden,  
> address@hidden,  address@hidden
> Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2011 15:51:00 +0100
> 
> Forcing current and future emacs development into the archaic 8.3 mold has
> a significant cost

The costs are generally mine, and mine alone.  I offered to do the
renaming job myself, provided some guidance from people who know their
way through gnulib.

> (just look at how long this thread is)

It could be much shorter if my original request was granted.  It is
long because people ask me questions and I respect them enough to
answer those questions in detail.  I don't mind keeping answering
them, but please don't hold that against me, or present that as
incurring significant costs on Emacs development.  If we want to cut
our losses, why not accept my suggestion, and be done with that?  For
that matter, how about presenting some technical reasons for objecting
the renaming I suggested, or any alternative renaming?  I explained
why proposed alternatives were problematic, but didn't yet see any
explanation of the reasons behind the apparent objection.

> yet provides relatively little benefit.

See, you are wrong here.  The number of times I found bugs in Emacs
that are of importance to Posix platforms, just by building the DOS
port, is not negligible.  The reasons are that the DOS build is very
similar to the Unix build --without-x (which evidently not many people
who track the development try these days), and its use of menus is
exactly identical to the no-toolkit X build.  These are evidently rare
configurations, but they are still supported.

I think that the occasional hour or two I invest once in a few weeks
when the DOS build becomes broken and I need to fix it is well payed
by the benefits that brings to Emacs development in general, by
uncovering bugs in those rare configurations.  And if it does some
service to a niche user community while at that, what's wrong with
that?

> If something like doslfn is reliable enough
> and not hard to install, then requiring it makes sense: then all emacs
> developers will be freed of this onerous file-naming constraint.

It's impossible for me to say if doslfn is reliable.  I never used it
myself, nor was it ever used widely enough by DJGPP users.

As for the onerous file-naming constraint, we have more than 3000
files in the Emacs tree, and the problem is limited to just 7 or so,
all of them recent additions.

> Imposing small relatively transparent requirements on users of less common
> systems is actually a good practice, when doing so permits improvements
> in the development process.

I'm not aware of any improvements in the development process that the
DOS port imposes.



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