Re: Making gnulib imports build on Windows

[Sam Steingold]

> * Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> [2011-01-26 21:29:59 +0200]:
>
> I don't like asking every end user to have Sed, especially since many
> Windows ports of Sed are notoriously broken (I had to port it myself
> to get a reliable tool).  And since 3) sounds like wheel reinvention,
> I tend to alternative 2).

I think 1 is the best long-term approach.

First of all, "windows culture" does not include building one's tools,
so, IMO, most windows Emacs users use the pre-built executables, thus
this change will affect only a few people.

Second, cygwin has been around for quite some time and it stable enough
for most purposes. I bet that most people who build Emacs on windows
already have cygwin installed. Yes, Eli is one important exception, but
I doubt that there are many (any?) others.
And those who hate cygwin can get gnuwin32.

Third, and most important: it is best to have one build system for all
platforms instead of separate build systems for unixes and windows.
I am talking from personal experience: GNU CLISP configures and builds
with the exact same command line on all platforms (well, you have to add
"--with-mingw" to configure on windows) and this has saved me a lot of
maintenance time and effort.
It is inevitable that more tools in addition to sed will seep into the
Emacs build process (especially since Emacs now relies on gnulib);
working around that will take Eli's time from real development into
maintaining a byzantine structure.

Yes, the price is installing gnuwin or cygwin.
However, I claim this is not a big deal: checking out Emacs bzr tree
consumes 0.5+G and cygwin/gnuwin take about that much each.

Yes, the up-front cost is higher: discarding all the configure.bat gunk
and switching to autoconf on windows will take more effort than simply
distributing pre-generated getopt.h and whatnot.
However, I claim that this cost will be paid eventually, sooner or
later, and the later this is done, the more effort this will require.
You cannot hold Emacs/windows build system with duct tape forever.

I have made this suggestion in the past and I know that Eli does not
like it. However, I am making it again here so that in a few years, when
Eli inevitably sees the light and relents, I can say "I told you so"
(provided I am still around :-).

-- 
Sam Steingold (http://sds.podval.org/) on CentOS release 5.3 (Final)
http://pmw.org.il http://www.memritv.org http://thereligionofpeace.com
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The software said it requires Windows 3.1 or better, so I installed Linux.