Re: installing emacs and X11 on OS X

["Stefan Monnier <foo@acm.com>" <monnier+gnu.emacs.help/news/@flint.cs.yale.edu>]

>>>>> "Eli" == Eli Zaretskii <eliz@is.elta.co.il> writes:
> A small study into the uses of window-system in Emacs's own code that we 
> did shows that it is used to test for a small number of features, but those 
> features are implicit: they are neither stated clearly in the code nor 
> even clearly understood in some cases.  So it seems like window-system is 
> a powerful tool for obfuscating Lisp code.

That's true and I generally completely agree that it's not the right
tool, but in the present case, the user wants the behavior to depend
on the kind of window system in use, really and the `window-system'
variable is the best there is for this right now.

And the only problem I can think of with that variable is "what happens
if the running Emacs has some frames open in X others in Gtk others
in a tty and yet others in carbon" ?

Of course, this can't happen right now, so it's not a problem yet.

The only reason to deprecate the use of window-system is because it's
generally misused.  And realistically, it's not going to go away any
time soon, even if it's deprecated because many many many people use
it.  So we should just live with it.  If people misuse it, let's educate
them.

The same problem appears with (string-match "Lucid\\|XEmacs" emacs-version),
yet we're not deprecating string-match, are we ?


        Stefan