Re: Files from gnulib

[Óscar Fuentes]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

>> For example, most files of CEDET were renamed to 8+3 some time ago,
>> breaking other elisp packages (e.g. company-mode, ecb, jde, matlab,
>> speechd-el) depending on them.
>
> Reality check: there were many changes made in CEDET due to admission
> into the Emacs distribution.  File-name changes were only a small part
> of them, and the changes just moved some files into subdirectories,
> such that foo-bar.el became foo/bar.el.

Those changes were a burden the day I tried to use an external package
which adds CEDET-based C# code completion to Emacs. I thought that as
the supposedly difficult part of installing CEDET was already done
thanks to its integration into the Emacs distribution, applying the
simple instructions for adding the C# package would be a piece of
cake. But soon discovered that the instructions and the .el file
referenced several files that apparently were missing from Emacs. After
some investigation I learned that those files were moved. It was not fun
to locate each file and patch the external package. Moving the files
will cause extra work to those who maintain external CEDET packages, so
they must introduce changes for supporting the new places while keeping
compatibility with the old ones.

This is just to demonstrate that the 8+3 issue is not as irrelevant as
you say. That said, I'm glad that the DOS port provides motivation for
keeping you as an Emacs maintainer, some renaming from time to time is a
little price to pay for that.