Re: Emacs vista build failures

["Lennart Borgman (gmail)" <lennart.borgman@gmail.com>]

David Kastrup wrote:
> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> 
>>> From: Richard M Stallman <rms@gnu.org>
>>> Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2008 18:05:28 -0400
>>> Cc: lord@emf.net, drobinow@gmail.com, lennart.borgman@gmail.com,
>>> 	hannes@saeurebad.de, emacs-devel@gnu.org, acm@muc.de, miles@gnu.org
>>>
>>>     > When I ask myself, is the world better for having Emacs and Firefox
>>>     > running on Microsoft Windows, the answer is an unequivocal yes -
>>>     > people who hack on MS-Windows can thus do a better job.
>>>
>>>     But their job does not in general benefit others.  So we are creating
>>>     better opportunities for work that does not help the community.
>>>
>>> I agree.
>> Are you saying that my hacking on the Windows Emacs doesn't benefit
>> others, including Emacs on other platforms?
> 
> You don't have time left for getting Emacs-Bidi to run on any platform,
> right?  Now it is, of course, your choice what to spend your developer
> time on, like it is everybody other's choice, too.

Maybe the easiest way to give Eli more time for that is give good 
support for needed tools on w32?

At least a lot of my time has been spent working around different 
deficiencys in GNU tools and other things needed on w32.

I do not know the reasons for these deficiences, but the deficiences are 
there. And they take a lot of time to get around sometimes. (We have 
currently been discussing the build/distribution problem for example.)

I can guess two main reasons for the deficiencies:

1) Lack of knowledge. It is not very common that someone knows both the 
GNU/Linux API and the w32 API in depth. A problem of this kind was the 
network problem with Emacs client on w32 (which took Juanma quite a 
while to solve).

Like most other people I would assume that this kind of problems should 
be worked around with libraries when possible. Something ios maybe wrong 
when this does not work?

2) The other reason I guess is important is attitude. If a lot of people 
with good reputation says that working on w32 is not that important then 
those with a more admiring mind might agree without really diving into 
the subject. That shows up in code quality later.