Re: [PROPOSAL] Builder, a build system integration for Emacs

[Richard Stallman]

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  > This is laudable but also requires effort, sometimes non trivial effort;
  > witness the extra hoops required to get functional tree-sitter "support"
  > inside emacs. Cargo is a (fairly slight, actually) evolution of the
  > strategy I first saw back in the mid-90's with CPAN (the "Comprehensive
  > Perl Archive Network"), through CTAN (similar for TeX), ruby, python, etc.

The fact that they all work basically the same way could be the reason
why many (or all?) of them have the sameproblem.

As I understand it, each of these library-choosing systems uses a
collection of libraries built up over the years.  Maybe it acceses
them using a network server, or maybe via a program that has a list of
all the libraries in that collection and crucial information about
each one.

So when you say to link a certain program, the library-choosing
systems figures out which of the libraries in that collection provide
symbols that the program needs.  And it links with them.

Is all that correct?

If so, I can now explain concretely the problem I am concerned about.

For each language, the people who build up the collection of libraries
have included some libraries that are not free.

Therefore, if the program you ask to build refers to symbols provided
by a nonfree library, you will get a linked executable that uses a
nonfree library.  For us, that is no good!  You should get an error
message.

You've said that these various library-choosing systems are designed
to work similarly, but they may not be entirely similar in this
regard.  Some of them may avoid this problem.  If so, I would be glad
to learn which ones do avoid it, and how each does so.

In the systems which do have this problem, we can't just accept it.
Fixing it is necessary for us.  They have not, as far as I know, done
much to help us.  I hope we can convince them to help, but if not,
we need to fork.

If the developers of some of these library-choosing systems have added
features that make this easier, I would be very glad.


-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)