Re: Preview: portable dumper

[Daniel Colascione]

On Sat, Dec 03 2016, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> From: Karl Fogel <address@hidden>
>> Date: Fri, 02 Dec 2016 14:11:23 -0600
>> 
>> Following up to what John said, with a perspective that may be useful to Eli:
>
> Thanks, but it isn't useful.  Why? because, like John, you don't think
> that my opinion about the preferred solution to getting rid of unexec
> is right.
>
> What would be useful is a perspective from someone who understands the
> issues and agrees with me about the preferred solution.  Because only
> such a person can see the dilemma through my eyes, and only that
> person can find the right words.

We've all been contributing to Emacs for many years. I think we have a
pretty good grasp of the issues and potential problems.  I understand
that you think there's an existential risk that goes into this change,
but I think you're mistaken, and a lot of other people agree. We all
have access to the same information; it's unlikely (but not impossible)
that you're the only one who can see certain potential problems. Please
give this change the benefit of the doubt.

Even if your worst-case scenario comes to pass, the worst outcome
outcome will just be more fiddly maintenance. I think the pdumper code
is pretty clean; I'm open to suggestions for making it moreso. The code
doesn't depend on arcane details of underlying operating systems --- it
depends only on details of Emacs itself.  We don't need ELF experts.
If there's no one left who can understand pdumper, there's no one left
who can understand the GC either.  In that scenario, we're already in
Mad Max territory anyway.

You won't have to touch this code.