Re: Building Emacs-cvs on Cygwin (GCC summary)

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Jari Aalto <jari.aalto@cante.net>
> Date: 05 Nov 2006 12:52:16 +0200
> > 
> > etc/PROBLEMS seems more appropriate.

In the meantime, I already added to PROBLEMS an entry about Cygwin
build with GCC 3.4.4.

> Woudl it be possible to use OS specific file:
> 
>   etc/NOTES.Cygwin

It's possible, but why would we want to do that?  There are at least
several good reasons not to:

 . System-specific files are a pain from the user's perspective, since
   the users need to be told where to find instructions relevant for
   their platform, and there's no good place to put these instructions
   (obviously, those instructions cannot be in a platform-specific
   files).  the etc/ directory is very large, so letting users look
   for the files on their own will make things hard on them

 . etc/PROBLEMS has an item in the Help menu, and searching it for
   "Cygwin" is trivial.  Many Emacs users already know about PROBLEMS
   and will look there when faced with a problem.

 . Cygwin build is, for all practical purposes, a Posix build, so
   users will probably assume that general Unix issues hold for it as
   well, and look for instructions and other build-related material in
   the general files, not in some OS-specific ones.