Re: CHECK_STRUCTS/dmpstruct.h mechanism is broken.

[Daniel Colascione]

> On 4/10/19 11:47 AM, Daniel Colascione wrote:
>> Without CHECK_STRUCTS, we *will* break dumped
>> Emacs in some subtle way sooner or later.
>
> We're gonna break dumped Emacs in subtle ways no matter what. After all,
> pdumper.c was broken in subtle ways when it was first introduced,
> despite CHECK_STRUCTS. That's just life, and it's not the issue here.
> The issue is whether the benefits of the CHECK_STRUCTS mechanism is
> worth the hassle. In my experience it's definitely not worth it.
>
> The more gingerbread we put into the Emacs build procedure, the more
> it's off-putting to other potential developers (and the more work it is
> for us). We already have too much build overhead (starting with
> Autoconf! I hate Autoconf! It should go away!) and we should not neglect
> its costs when looking at the benefits of a new hassle we add to the
> build procedure. So far the benefits of CHECK_STRUCT have been zero in
> the master, and the costs have been slowdown and significant annoyance
> to the developer who's made the most changes to this part of the code.

CHECK_STRUCTS was very useful when pdumper was out of tree and I had to
rebase it regularly. You can disable the thing locally for iterative
development.