> From: Jim Meyering <j...@meyering.net> > Cc: Bastien ROUCARIES <roucaries.bast...@gmail.com>, egg...@cs.ucla.edu, > bug-gnulib@gnu.org, monn...@iro.umontreal.ca, emacs-de...@gnu.org > 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.
