Re: Emacs-devel Digest, Vol 52, Issue 61

["Eric S. Raymond" <esr@thyrsus.com>]

emacs-devel-request@gnu.org <emacs-devel-request@gnu.org>:
> > > Whatever the reason, this is a horrendous time sink.  Failure to
> > > build the CVS head should essentially _never_ happen - possibly once
> > > or twice a year at most.
> 
> > Sorry, but it's hopelessly unrealistic to request that.  Given the
> > number of different platforms we support, it is impractical even to
> > request that any given change will compile on all of them, let alone
> > build without a hitch.
> 
> OK.  I have an utterly standard, if somewhat old, GNU/Linux box, probably
> the most popular setup.  I think it's reasonable to expect the trunk to
> build on my box nearly all the time.  Possibly on w32, too.

I agree with this complaint, and I'm getting extremely frustrated.  I
have been unable to work on vc.el for about *two weeks* now because
the recommended "make maintainer-clean; configure; make bootstrap"
consistently fails with this:

make[3]: *** No rule to make target `/home/esr/cvs/emacs/lisp/nxml/nxml-enc.elc', needed by `compile-main'.  Stop.

This is on stock Ubuntu 8.04.  Whoever said expecting builds in CVS to
work consistently was "hopelessly unrealistic" is simply revealing that the 
Emacs system is broken as designed.  Maybe this is a *reason* we have so 
few developers?
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>