Re: Files from gnulib

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Stefan Monnier <address@hidden>
> Cc: address@hidden, address@hidden, address@hidden,
>         address@hidden
> Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2011 17:15:37 -0500
> 
> >   . Once the remapping is maintained by humans, it becomes unreliable.
> 
> Why is that?

Because people err and don't always pay attention to all changes that
affect this issue.

> >   . The unpacking instructions are part of the tarball, and need to be
> >     extracted separately before the "main" extraction begins.  More
> >     importantly, the remapping file needs to be extracted before that
> >     as well.  This makes the entire unpacking procedure extremely
> >     complicated and thus error-prone, except if the person who does
> >     that is the one who designed it and wrote the instructions in the
> >     first place.
> 
> Rather than distribute a file that needs to be passed to djtar, I was
> thinking of distributing a script tailored to MS-DOS, run instead of
> djtar, and which would run djtar insternally.  So this script can
> provide the instructions.

How will that script be distributed?

> > In addition, there will be a need to deal with something that the GDB
> > distribution doesn't.  In GDB, the files that are renamed during
> > unpacking are only those that are not used for the DOS build.  By
> > contrast, here we want to rename files that are used during the build.
> 
> Yes, that's a much bigger problem.

There's more to it.  If the affected files are mentioned in some Lisp
files, then those Lisp files will need to be recompiled after being
edited.  That means the Emacs build process on MSDOS will have to run
Make in the lips/ subdirectory, which until now it didn't.
lisp/Makefile requires a Unixy shell (and associated utilities, like
Coreutils), which would be now another prerequisite for building
Emacs.

I'm sure we will discover more difficulties, because even GDB didn't
rename files used in building on DOS.

> In the mean time, please rename the files, thank you,

Thank you.