Re: PGTK-related misconceptions

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com>
> Cc: jporterbugs@gmail.com, luangruo@yahoo.com, emacs-devel@gnu.org,
>  spwhitton@spwhitton.name
> Date: Tue, 19 Apr 2022 18:13:03 +1000
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> 
> >> 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.

If there's a significant difference, for the purposes of this
discussion, between "don't read" and "don't read carefully", then I'm
afraid I don't understand what you wanted to say.  Either people will
miss what we say or they won't.  In the latter case, what we already
say is enough; in the former case it doesn't matter what we will say
or add to what we did already, because both INSTALL and NEWS are large
files and contain a lot of stuff.  So I fail to see how the fine point
of "carefully" is relevant here.

> > 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!

They are easily overlooked by one part of the people (usually, those
who don't read the documentation "carefully" enough), and are annoying
to the other part, those who don't overlook the warnings (because they
usually already read the documentation and did TRT).

> Just like the warning about removal of pop support and pointer
> to mail utils, this warning could be at the end of the build.

The warning about pop support and Mailutils is at the end of the
configure script, not the end of the build.  If you build by saying
just "make" (which is the normal way of building Emacs these days),
then you won't see the warning "at the end" because Make runs the
Makefiles immediately after the configure script finishes.

> At any
> rate, seems like a more important warning than one about no longer
> supporting pop3, which few mail providers support anymore anyway. 

That's not what that warning is about, not at all.  I guess you didn't
read it "carefully" enough.

> > 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.

This thread amassed 2 dozen messages already, so I think there are
some who do think it's a big deal.

> 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.

If you read what I wrote, I explicitly said I didn't object to adding
this stuff to INSTALL.  But I don't think it will solve the problem of
people who don't read the documentation "carefully" enough to pay
attention.