Re: Emacs vista build failures

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Richard M Stallman <rms@gnu.org>
>> Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2008 18:05:28 -0400
>> Cc: lord@emf.net, drobinow@gmail.com, lennart.borgman@gmail.com,
>> 	hannes@saeurebad.de, emacs-devel@gnu.org, acm@muc.de, miles@gnu.org
>> 
>>     > When I ask myself, is the world better for having Emacs and Firefox
>>     > running on Microsoft Windows, the answer is an unequivocal yes -
>>     > people who hack on MS-Windows can thus do a better job.
>> 
>>     But their job does not in general benefit others.  So we are creating
>>     better opportunities for work that does not help the community.
>> 
>> I agree.
>
> Are you saying that my hacking on the Windows Emacs doesn't benefit
> others, including Emacs on other platforms?

You don't have time left for getting Emacs-Bidi to run on any platform,
right?  Now it is, of course, your choice what to spend your developer
time on, like it is everybody other's choice, too.  In the mean time,
the only workable solutions to enter right-to-left texts remain
proprietary ones, like Unipad under Windows.  And there are a lot of
other tasks that remain to be done in order to arrive at freely
available solutions for everyone and every task, whereas "every
operating system including proprietary ones" is not really crucial.
Keeping the focus on free platforms helps to cut down on distractions.
Of course it is everybody's own choice to set his own priorities.  And
doing something at all is preferable to just mouthing off like I mostly
do.

But it is a good idea to reevaluate one's priorities from time to time
and ask oneself about the net benefits.  And "can people do freely now
what they could not before?" is a more important question for the GNU
project than "can people do on a proprietary platform now what they
could only do on a free one before?".

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum