Re: Emacs 21.3.50 grep.el/executable.el problems

["Eli Zaretskii" <eliz@elta.co.il>]

> From: Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>
> Date: 16 Feb 2004 11:14:35 -0500
> 
> > I got the impression that the grep/executable problems don't get
> > fixed, because there should be perhaps a more extensive change.
> 
> My opinion is that the "extensive" change would be to rip out the recent
> change altogether.

I already did that, at Richard's request.

> What's the point of testing whether `find' is
> a unix-like find or not since if it isn't we have no good alternative
> anyway.  The only point I could see is to give a more meaningful error
> message for those few W32 folks who end up running some unrelated find.exe.
> But even then, I highly doubt it'll make any significant difference or is
> worth the trouble: the problem seem to be fairly infrequent and for those
> people who do end up posting on gnu.emacs.help, I expect they would post as
> well if the message said "you need to install a unix-like `find'" because
> they have no idea what the message is telling them and where to find
> a unix-like `find'.

In my experience, on a Windows system this problem is pretty frequent,
and when it happens, the error message that comes from the non-Posix
`find' is so cryptic that even occasional gurus get confused.

So IMHO a better error message from Emacs _is_ worth the trouble,
just not the kind of trouble that Jari got us into ;-)