Re: Still unable to build trunk

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Jim Meyering <address@hidden>
> Cc: address@hidden,  address@hidden,  address@hidden,  address@hidden
> Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2011 19:47:04 +0100
> 
> Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> >> From: Jim Meyering <address@hidden>
> >> Cc: address@hidden, address@hidden, address@hidden,
> >> address@hidden
> >> Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2011 18:35:17 +0100
> >>
> >> Requiring the installation of a few commonly-used and very portable tools
> >> does not make a steep curve.  It's more of a small, one-time investment.
> >
> > You forget about dependencies.
> 
> Hardly.  The few programs we're talking about
> (mainly just m4, automake and autoconf) have very few dependencies.

You are talking about a specific example, while I'm talking about
adding prerequisites in principle.

> People participating in emacs development (even if only building
> from latest cloned sources) can be expected to follow a few simple
> instructions.  If they have to rerun a few commands after someone
> else upgrades their development system, that does not strike me as an
> unreasonable burden, and certainly not as an exponentially heavy one.

It's easy for us old-timers to say.  Not so easy for everyone else to
follow suit.

> I see that you're using over 22GiB(!) there.
> Remove just one of your many emacs-*.tar.gz files
> and that will free far more space than any tiny tool
> installation would consume.

Please believe me that I need everything that I have there.

> > Anyway, this is just an example of why adding more prerequisites is
> > not something to do easily, IMO.
> 
> If we recoil from every task that at first appears nontrivial,
> we will never make progress.

There's a world of possibilities between "recoil from" and "accept
without discussion".

> Re "just a couple gnulib functions", Paul deliberately made the
> initial introduction small.  There are many more opportunities.

You cannot fight the fire if you wait until it consumes the entire
building.