Re: Emacs vista build failures

[christophe <genium@member.fsf.org>]

On Sun, Jul 20, 2008 at 10:37 PM,  Johannes Weiner <hannes@saeurebad.de> wrote:
> ------------------------------
> Date: Sun, 20 Jul 2008 22:22:08 +0200
> From: Johannes Weiner <hannes@saeurebad.de>
> Subject: Re: Emacs vista build failures
> To: rms@gnu.org
> Cc: acm@muc.de, lord@emf.net, drobinow@gmail.com, emacs-devel@gnu.org,
>        Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>
> Message-ID: <87ej5oz4pb.fsf@saeurebad.de>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
> Richard M Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:
>
>>     > That is good news, but the general problem remains
>>     > as far as I know.  Has there been a general move towards
>>     > supporting the GNU configure and build specs?
>>
>>     As far as I know (I don't hack on X, I just read the mailing list), the
>>     entire build infrastructure was replaced, and you can now do
>>     "./configure ...; make" etc., and things work in the normal GNU
>>     style.
>>
>> We are miscommunicating.  As regards X itself, I took for granted that
>> that is what you meant.
>>
>> My question concerns looking beyond X to the free software community
>> as a whole.  Has there been a broader move towords supporting the GNU
>> configure and build specs?
>
> Maybe you heard the term `autohell' once?  People tend to forget about
> political issues when they are just frustrated with the software.
>
>        Hannes

Conversely, it is difficult to spread our philosophy and reach out to
new communities with tools not originally designed for them; it seems
especially the case when they're unfortunately centred around
technical issues rather than social change. There is a lot of emacs
users in rails community; it would be nice if they could come here and
thereby help the free software movement...

I noted this last year with sadness on this blog post:
http://www.zedshaw.com/rants/rails_is_a_ghetto.html
«... Any experienced developer knows that autoconf configure files are
a PAIN IN THE ASS to recreate. They almost always require special
reconfigure calls, special m4 macros, or just time. You usually get
them right, generate them once, and then leave them in your repository
for all to use. To make it worse, Kevin actually wrote a supposed
alternative to autoconf, and yet he doesn't know the most basic thing
about autoconf...».

christophe.