Re: PGTK-related misconceptions

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> 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.)

> 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.

> 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.