From: Jim Meyering <jim@meyering.net>
To: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>
Cc: cyd@stupidchicken.com, eggert@cs.ucla.edu, jan.h.d@swipnet.se,
emacs-devel@gnu.org
Subject: Re: Still unable to build trunk
Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2011 19:47:04 +0100 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <87bp37bgpj.fsf@meyering.net> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <83lj2bzdvj.fsf@gnu.org> (Eli Zaretskii's message of "Sun, 23 Jan 2011 20:14:24 +0200")
Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> From: Jim Meyering <jim@meyering.net>
>> Cc: eggert@cs.ucla.edu, cyd@stupidchicken.com, jan.h.d@swipnet.se,
>> emacs-devel@gnu.org
>> Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2011 18:35:17 +0100
>>
>> Requiring the installation of a few commonly-used and very portable tools
>> does not make a steep curve. It's more of a small, one-time investment.
>
> You forget about dependencies.
Hardly. The few programs we're talking about
(mainly just m4, automake and autoconf) have very few dependencies.
> And about upgrading from time to time.
If fencepost were upgraded more often, this would not be a problem.
If you're worried about one of these privately-installed packages
being invalidated by a (rare) upgrade, then just rerun the script
to install them from scratch again.
> With every additional prerequisite, the burden gets exponentially more
> heavy. And it's certainly not on-time.
People participating in emacs development (even if only building
from latest cloned sources) can be expected to follow a few simple
instructions. If they have to rerun a few commands after someone
else upgrades their development system, that does not strike me as an
unreasonable burden, and certainly not as an exponentially heavy one.
>> > Even core Emacs maintainers have trouble with these prerequisites, for
>> > any number of reasons (e.g., Autoconf installed on fencepost is too
>> > old for what Paul added to the Emacs tree, so until the GNU admins
>> > upgrade that at my request, I cannot build the current tree).
>>
>> Run the script below on fencepost, following the instructions
>> in its --help, and you should be good to go.
>
> It's not my system, so I don't want private installation of
> everything.
If you run the script and have it install only m4, automake and
autoconf, the result occupies less than 6MiB.
> My home directory there is already one of the hugest. I
> was asked by sysadmins to go through them in cases such as this one,
> in order to avoid bloating my home directory even more.
I see that you're using over 22GiB(!) there.
Remove just one of your many emacs-*.tar.gz files
and that will free far more space than any tiny tool
installation would consume.
> Anyway, this is just an example of why adding more prerequisites is
> not something to do easily, IMO.
If we recoil from every task that at first appears nontrivial,
we will never make progress.
>> > Imagine
>> > what will happen to people with less experience and grey hair,
>> > especially if they do that on systems they don't own.
>>
>> It is most definitely a trade-off, but afaik, one that we have
>> managed well with coreutils, diffutils, gzip, grep, parted, etc.
>> On those projects, no one has reported trouble with the build process
>> for some time.
>
> I don't know if the comparison is valid. More importantly, the fact
> that the addition is due to syncing a couple of functions with gnulib
> is troublesome -- it sounds like a tail that wags the dog.
I have endured more than my fair share of conflicts due to
version-controlled sources that are also generated by the build process.
That taught me that avoiding such trouble is well worth this type of investment.
Re "just a couple gnulib functions", Paul deliberately made the
initial introduction small. There are many more opportunities.
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2011-01-23 18:47 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 113+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2011-01-20 18:47 Still unable to build trunk Chong Yidong
2011-01-20 19:39 ` Jan Djärv
2011-01-20 22:16 ` Chong Yidong
2011-01-21 20:42 ` Paul Eggert
2011-01-22 1:29 ` Chong Yidong
2011-01-22 7:25 ` Paul Eggert
2011-01-22 15:03 ` Eli Zaretskii
2011-01-23 15:33 ` Jim Meyering
2011-01-23 17:00 ` Eli Zaretskii
2011-01-23 17:35 ` Jim Meyering
2011-01-23 18:14 ` Eli Zaretskii
2011-01-23 18:47 ` Jim Meyering [this message]
2011-01-23 19:06 ` Eli Zaretskii
2011-01-23 20:08 ` Jim Meyering
2011-01-23 21:23 ` Paul Eggert
2011-01-24 1:01 ` Stefan Monnier
2011-01-24 1:22 ` Miles Bader
2011-01-24 8:48 ` Glenn Morris
2011-01-24 16:26 ` Stefan Monnier
2011-03-08 4:22 ` A better autogen.sh [was Re: Still unable to build trunk] Glenn Morris
2011-03-08 19:51 ` Stefan Monnier
2011-03-10 16:10 ` Thien-Thi Nguyen
2011-03-15 20:22 ` A better autogen.sh Glenn Morris
2011-03-15 21:52 ` Paul Eggert
2011-03-15 22:09 ` Glenn Morris
2011-03-15 22:37 ` Glenn Morris
2011-03-15 22:58 ` Paul Eggert
2011-03-16 4:05 ` Eli Zaretskii
2011-03-16 4:14 ` Glenn Morris
2011-03-16 4:17 ` Glenn Morris
2011-03-16 5:53 ` Eli Zaretskii
2011-03-16 6:39 ` Paul Eggert
2011-03-16 8:10 ` Eli Zaretskii
2011-03-16 9:08 ` Paul Eggert
2011-03-16 10:12 ` Eli Zaretskii
2011-03-16 10:47 ` joakim
2011-03-16 11:53 ` Eli Zaretskii
2011-03-16 12:25 ` joakim
2011-03-16 12:42 ` Eli Zaretskii
2011-03-16 17:52 ` Paul Eggert
2011-03-16 18:54 ` Eli Zaretskii
2011-03-16 20:40 ` Paul Eggert
2011-03-16 11:33 ` Juanma Barranquero
2011-03-16 11:21 ` Juanma Barranquero
2011-03-16 6:43 ` Glenn Morris
2011-03-16 8:47 ` Eli Zaretskii
2011-03-16 9:23 ` Paul Eggert
2011-03-16 10:37 ` Eli Zaretskii
2011-03-16 17:17 ` Glenn Morris
2011-03-16 17:45 ` Glenn Morris
2011-03-16 18:16 ` Eli Zaretskii
2011-03-16 18:20 ` Glenn Morris
2011-03-16 19:13 ` Eli Zaretskii
2011-03-16 18:15 ` Eli Zaretskii
2011-03-16 15:34 ` Stefan Monnier
2011-03-16 18:09 ` Glenn Morris
2011-03-16 19:12 ` Eli Zaretskii
2011-03-16 19:40 ` Stefan Monnier
2011-03-16 20:56 ` Paul Eggert
2011-03-17 20:36 ` Glenn Morris
2011-03-17 20:40 ` Eli Zaretskii
2011-03-17 20:44 ` Glenn Morris
2011-03-17 20:51 ` Eli Zaretskii
2011-03-18 2:02 ` Paul Eggert
2011-03-16 18:10 ` Eli Zaretskii
2011-03-16 19:13 ` Eli Zaretskii
2011-03-28 20:29 ` A better autogen.sh [was Re: Still unable to build trunk] chad
2011-03-28 20:58 ` A better autogen.sh Glenn Morris
2011-03-28 21:45 ` Chad Brown
2011-03-28 21:51 ` Glenn Morris
2011-03-29 1:17 ` Stefan Monnier
2011-03-29 2:21 ` Glenn Morris
2011-03-29 3:36 ` Stefan Monnier
2011-03-29 6:39 ` Glenn Morris
2011-03-29 12:09 ` Jim Meyering
2011-03-29 12:19 ` Andreas Schwab
2011-03-29 12:23 ` Jim Meyering
2011-03-29 14:13 ` Stephen J. Turnbull
2011-03-29 15:25 ` Jim Meyering
2011-03-29 16:38 ` Stephen J. Turnbull
2011-03-29 18:46 ` chad
2011-03-30 6:15 ` Jim Meyering
2011-03-30 11:27 ` Eli Zaretskii
2011-03-30 12:03 ` Jim Meyering
2011-03-30 17:48 ` Eli Zaretskii
2011-03-30 19:26 ` Jim Meyering
2011-03-30 20:02 ` Eli Zaretskii
2011-03-30 20:14 ` Glenn Morris
2011-03-30 21:36 ` Stefan Monnier
2011-03-30 21:41 ` Glenn Morris
2011-03-31 14:36 ` Stefan Monnier
2011-03-28 21:57 ` A better autogen.sh [was Re: Still unable to build trunk] Eli Zaretskii
2011-01-24 18:14 ` Still unable to build trunk Eli Zaretskii
2011-01-24 20:58 ` Paul Eggert
2011-01-24 21:07 ` Andreas Schwab
2011-01-24 22:47 ` Glenn Morris
2011-01-25 6:01 ` Richard Stallman
2011-01-25 19:58 ` Eli Zaretskii
2011-01-25 20:14 ` Savannah loggerhead [was Re: Still unable to build trunk] Glenn Morris
2011-01-26 0:44 ` Still unable to build trunk Richard Stallman
2011-01-26 3:56 ` Eli Zaretskii
2011-01-26 12:35 ` Lennart Borgman
2011-01-26 13:18 ` Eli Zaretskii
2011-01-26 13:35 ` Andy Moreton
2011-01-26 13:42 ` Jim Meyering
2011-01-27 9:38 ` Jim Meyering
2011-01-27 11:16 ` Eli Zaretskii
2011-01-27 11:20 ` Lennart Borgman
2011-01-27 11:31 ` Eli Zaretskii
2011-01-27 18:27 ` Paul Eggert
2011-01-29 11:49 ` Darren Hoo
2011-01-29 12:19 ` Darren Hoo
2011-01-29 13:04 ` Eli Zaretskii
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
List information: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to=87bp37bgpj.fsf@meyering.net \
--to=jim@meyering.net \
--cc=cyd@stupidchicken.com \
--cc=eggert@cs.ucla.edu \
--cc=eliz@gnu.org \
--cc=emacs-devel@gnu.org \
--cc=jan.h.d@swipnet.se \
/path/to/YOUR_REPLY
https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line
before the message body.
Code repositories for project(s) associated with this public inbox
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for read-only IMAP folder(s) and NNTP newsgroup(s).