Re: Software/HD ecology (was Re:...Bug in Emacs 21.3.50)

[Ajanta <ajanta@no.spam>]

 Stefan Monnier <foo@acm.com> wrote:

> > "EnglishOnly" 
> And "FrenchOnly" and "GermanOnly" and "EnglishAndFrenchOnly" and
> "ChineseAndEnglishOnly" and ... ?
> Or are you going to claim that we should not care about non-English users ?

Well, there are *hundreds* of langauges in the world: which one would
you not want to "care" about? Sooner or later "internationalization"
has got to mean not just *adding* things but also *selecting* them.
Maybe this should be done at configure stage, via options, or
interactively, oe some other way. It is for the programmers to figure
out the best way, but the time to start thinking about it is now.

> > Why is that comparable with the clutter of tens of MB and 100's of files
> > scattered around?
> 
> Could you expand on your "scattered around" ?

I didn't keep a tally but here is an example. I recently I obtained a
beta distribution (not emacs) which didn't work out (fair enough,
that's a known risk in beta) and I deleted it. Or so I thought. I still
keep running into some files from it. What gives me pause is that these
are the ones I recognize because of the way they are named. There are
many whose names mean nothing to me, I don't know which program they
belong to, so they'll lie around. (At first, I did take a shot in the
dark and tried "make uninstall", but it didn't work.)

As I mentioned in the beginning post of this thread, the distribution
of Emacs 21.3.50 that I got for Mac OSX has *three* executables of
identical size but different inodes. This makes no sense at all.

A