Re: Files from gnulib

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2011 13:24:11 -0800
> From: Paul Eggert <address@hidden>
> CC: address@hidden, address@hidden, address@hidden, 
>  address@hidden
> 
> On 01/25/11 11:02, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> 
> > To read the instructions, you need to unpack the archive first.
> 
> That may have been true years ago, when the tarballs themselves were
> the main way that one could find out how to do maintenance.  But that
> long ago stopped being true for Emacs.  If I wanted to come up to
> speed on how to build Emacs for MS-DOS, the first thing I'd do would
> be a Google search, which would point me at places like
> <http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs-fr/EmacsForDOS> and
> <http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/MS_002dDOS.html>.
> If these places contain extraction instructions, that's good enough.

And what about the emacs-25.chg file?  Would you expect users to
google for it as well, and copy-paste it into their shell window?  I
hope you will agree that it's a very bad idea.  So the file will have
to be extracted first, and you are back at the same problem as with
the instructions again.

> For example, it should be pretty easy to check emacs-25.chg
> automatically; is that done with GDB?

Yes, it is done.  But it doesn't catch all the errors.  More
importantly, the remapping file is maintained manually.  See my
response to Stefan.

> > If the decision is not to rename these few files in the Emacs
> > distribution, and instead ask me to cope with these complications, I
> > will understand that the knee-jerk reaction of too many members of
> > this community when they hear "MS-DOS" is more important that any
> > voice of reason
> 
> I hope that you don't include me in members whose knees are jerking.

I no longer know who is and who isn't.  Oscar's was the only message
that sounded like a glimpse of light in the darkness.

> Personally I would just rename the files in gnulib and be done with
> it, as none of the name changes seem to be onerous.  However, we don't
> seem to have consensus for that now; I seem to be the only gnulib
> developer who would go that route.

We are talking about renaming files in the Emacs repo.  Why would
gnulib developers have any say in that?

> Also, the problem of non-8+3 file names does not seem to be limited
> to gnulib-derived files.

Yes, they are limited to gnulib-derived files.  If you mean Org, I'm
sure those files will be renamed.

> All in all it sounds like automating the renaming on the MS-DOS side
> would be a reasonable thing to do.

Theoretically, yes.  It sounded like that years ago, when it was
introduced into GDB.  I feel much better now, thank you.

> This is a bit of work but doesn't seem that hard.  And if we get the
> automation working well with Emacs we could then apply similar ideas
> to GDB as well, and make GDB development less error-prone on MS-DOS.

Who is "we" here, I wonder.