Re: Omitting Windows-specific parts from infrastructure changes

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2015 10:00:55 -0800
> From: Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>
> CC: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > Doing nothing means leaving the parts
> > you side-stepped to bit-rot and generate bug reports,
> 
> Nothing is rotting here, as the code is working.

It is working because I cleaned it up.  It didn't work before that,
and in some places didn't use the new infrastructure, but the old
one.  Leaving this as it is will eventually produce maintenance
headaches we are better without.

> No bug reports have been generated because of this longstanding
> practice.  As the benefits of the proposed change to the practice do
> not appear to exceed the costs, I'd rather leave things be.

The costs are minuscule: just a short notice posted here.  So I really
don't understand why you refuse to honor such a simple and reasonable
request for some minimal help to your fellow developers.  Can you
explain?

> > Leaving it to others to discover the places that were omitted, without
> > any guidance as to how to identify them is too error-prone
> 
> No special guidance is needed, as the search heuristics are obvious.  For 
> example, if the change involves replacing strcat with stpcpy, look at all uses 
> of strcat in the modules you're interested in.

All I'm asking is to post a short note to that effect when such
changes are done in the future.  Without that, what needs to be done
is not easily discoverable, since we don't usually document that in
our logs.  In contrast, someone who does this change should have no
difficulty either describing the search heuristics or even pointing
out the places where the changes need to be followed-up.