Re: PGTK-related misconceptions

[Tim Cross]

Jim Porter <jporterbugs@gmail.com> writes:

>
> I think it would be best to state explicitly that there are problems with the
> PGTK build, though INSTALL probably doesn't need to go into any more detail 
> than
> that. In practice, a lot of people will probably just skim the documentation, 
> so
> they might miss some of the more subtle points unless they're very clearly
> called out.

I agree. I think this is the main point being missed by others who have
argued the existing documentation is clear enough. Like it or not,
people often don't read the documentation or NEWS file carefully. There
is also a tendency for people to believe any new feature is an
improvement and I suspect many people will think a pure GTK build is
going to be better than a hybrid X/GTK one. 

We should just add a very explicit and clear warning not to use
--with-pgtk if your running under X and put this statement right at the
beginning of the section in the NEWS file about this new option. 

It might even be worthwhile adding a warning in configure as well (like
the one we have about pop support). Like others, I expect many
distributions are going to bundle emacs-gtk believing it is an
improvement. I suspect it is going to be a bigger issue given that some
popular distributions, like fedora, will be shipping with wayland as
their default but there will likely be many who will choose to switch
back to X, but then be faced with an Emacs built with pgtk to better
support the default wayland setup.