On 05/02/2017 02:55 PM, Bruno Haible wrote:
it would be good to know what qualms you have with the msvc-nothrow module. Should Emacs be built with mingw, not MSVC? Is an EBADF situation never going to occur in Emacs anyway? Are the portability efforts for mingw and MSVC in Gnulib useless for Emacs, because on native Windows Emacs uses its own w32.c instead anyway? Does Emacs have other requirements I don't know about?
I know little about MS-Windows. Emacs has gotten along without msvc-nothrow and msvc-inval for quite some time and so may not need them. Adding them to Emacs may break MS-Windows builds in subtle ways that I am not qualified to judge. So, being cautious, I omitted them.
There was a similar issue with the recent Gnulib changes for daylight-saving time in MS-Windows, where I omitted the relevant modules from Emacs because Emacs has been running for years without these DST fixes and I worried that adding the new Gnulib modules would break and/or complicate the Emacs build unnecessarily.
It should be easy enough for someone with MS-Windows expertise to experiment with the new Gnulib functionality in Emacs: in the Emacs master branch, edit admin/merge-gnulib's AVOIDED_MODULES variable so that it no longer lists the modules you want to use. Then run admin/merge-gnulib and build the result on MS-Windows.
1) The Emacs w32.c ports to Windows98 as well, whereas Gnulib currently assumes Windows XP at least (and will soon move to Windows 7, I guess - namely when no one has a test machine with Windows XP any more). Merit or demerit? Opinion?
In the past Eli has argued for supporting ancient MS-Windows and MS-DOS versions. I don't know whether he still cares. (By "ancient" I mean that Microsoft itself no longer supports them.)
