Re: multi-tty breakage on MS-Windows

[Dan Nicolaescu <dann@ics.uci.edu>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

  > > Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
  > > From: Dan Nicolaescu <dann@ics.uci.edu>
  > > Date: Sat, 08 Sep 2007 08:32:38 -0700
  > > 
  > > Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
  > > 
  > >   >   . "emacs -nw" crashes on startup; backtrace attached below.
  > > 
  > > This is a known problem, Jason Rumney stated that this does not work
  > > in his message announcing that multi-tty was ported to Windows. 
  > > Can you please help fixing it? 
  > 
  > I will, if I find enough time.  This is made harder by almost complete
  > lack of documentation of how multi-tty works.  Can someone please make
  > an effort of explaining it in plain English?  

IHMO there's nobody beside the multi-tty author that understands the
design well enough to be able to write correct documentation... 

  > The changes installed as result of the merge are extensive and
  > very invasive, and it's hard to figure them out without some
  > guidance.  Judging by the amount of problems we had lately on any
  > platform but GNU/Linux, 

I have a different impression, things have not been bad at all. It
might be misleading that the same problems were reported over and over
followed by very long discussions.

Here's a summary of what I can remember right now:
Cygwin: 
 - 1 problem that was solved with a 2 line patch by people that (from
 the sound of it) didn't have much experience hacking  either emacs or
 cygwin. Pretty good in my book.

Mac:
  - 2 problems: 
    - bootstrap problem because of requiring 'url from
      term/mac-win.el. The fix is simple, but nobody has done it.
    - input is very slow
    Unfortunately nobody is willing to do any work on this platform,
    the plan seems to be to abandon this port and switch to a
    different toolkit (or whatever is called on a mac).
    Nobody has done any testing on this platform since multi-tty has
    been in CVS and until after the merge. 
    I am inclined to say that we should disable/or print a big warning
    when configuring this platform.

Windows: 
  - 2 problems:
    - -nw not working
    - Some issue with setting the invisible property in default-frame-alist
  Those were both known at the time the Windows port first worked on
  the multi-tty branch.

  > Also, how come Karoly is suddenly silent or unavailable for help when
  > his work is being installed 

Don't know, last I heard from him was about 2 months ago...

  > and used on platforms he obviously didn't try?

To his defense, this was documented as such.