Re: PGTK-related misconceptions

[Tim Cross]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com>
>> Date: Tue, 19 Apr 2022 12:18:07 +1000
>> Cc: Po Lu <luangruo@yahoo.com>, emacs-devel@gnu.org,
>>  Sean Whitton <spwhitton@spwhitton.name>
>> 
>> 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. 
>
> Aren't you contradicting yourself here?  If people don't read
> documentation, how can any addition to the documentation solve this
> issue?  (Of course, I don't object to saying something in INSTALL
> about that, just pointing out that it's hard to have it both ways.)
>

Eli, rather ironically you just proved my point. I didn't say they
didn't read the documentation, I said they didn't read it carefully.
Just like you did with my post, they skim read it and can easily miss
crucial points. The fact people are building with pgtk when only running
under X would tend to indicate the messaging is not adequate. Making a
clear concise statement not to use pgtk when using X early, even at the
start, would increase the likelihood skim readers see it.

>> It might even be worthwhile adding a warning in configure as well (like
>> the one we have about pop support).
>
> I object to annoying people who build Emacs with such warnings.
> Besides, warnings (as opposed to errors) in the configure script are
> easily overlooked, because people tend to leave the build run
> unattended, and do other useful things while it runs.
>

I guess there not terribly annoying if they are easily overlooked!

Just like the warning about removal of pop support and pointer
to mail utils, this warning could be at the end of the build. At any
rate, seems like a more important warning than one about no longer
supporting pop3, which few mail providers support anymore anyway. 

>> 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.
>
> IME, there's nothing we can do against such misconceptions.  We will
> get bug reports and will respond by pointing people to NEWS and
> INSTALL.  Eventually, enough people will bump into this to realize the
> truth, and the issue will go away.  No catastrophe that I could spot,
> and no need to get too excited.

You do seem to like jumping to extremes. I don't think anyone has been
screaming catastrophe. All I've seen is people asking to make this more
obvious and explicit. Maybe it won't make a big difference, but then
again, maybe it will. The cost of making the limitations of pgtk more
explicit in NEWS and INSTALL is very low and even if it only stops a few
people from doing the wrorng build, reporting a 'non-bug' and getting
directed back to NEW/INSTALL and having to rebuild, I think the cost has
been justified.