Re: new image library "requirements"

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

>     > Yes, where does it all end?  Emacs will build without alsa headers but
>     > presumably that leads to some loss of functionality (playing midi files,
>     > maybe?).  Should configure throw an error when these aren't found?
>
> The answer to that question isn't a theoretical one.  It is a matter
> of how important a given feature is as a feature of Emacs.
>
> For instance, for sound: how important a problem is it that people
> build Emacs and don't get sound, just because they didn't have the
> right headers installed?  On the other side, how big an
> inconvenience is it to be pressured into installing the headers,
> when you didn't want sound anyway?

We want to avoid having "underfeatured" Emacs binaries around without
people noticing: particularly bad track records have missing X11
support and missing XPM support (needed for color icons).

Requiring explicit options for suppressing such libraries (even if it
is just --without-panic) will mean that the output of
system-configuration-options (which is reported by report-emacs-bug)
will reflect this compilation configuration.  This makes error
diagnosis easier and provides a first pointer to the user before
actually sending the bug report.

When the user is not identical with the person compiling Emacs, this
might be even more relevant, though in all fairness, I think most of
the problems reported in this context have been from users making
their own compilations.

-- 
David Kastrup