Re: Omitting Windows-specific parts from infrastructure changes

[Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> I'm sure when you do such changes, you
> grep (or otherwise search) the whole tree for relevant places

No, I hardly ever do that.  For example, I don't look at the Lisp code if I'm 
changing some aspect of the C code that shouldn't affect Lisp.  And in instances 
like the strcpy/stpcpy change, where the changes' effects don't bleed into the 
MS-Windows port, I don't look at the MS-Windows code.  In this sense the 
MS-Windows code is like the OS X code, or like any other part of the Emacs 
source code for that matter.

Ideally, the MS-Windows code would be a completely separate module, so that 
changes in the Emacs core would not affect it and non-MS-Windows developers 
would never need to worry about it.  We're obviously not there, as we have too 
many dependencies between the core and the MS-Windows code, one of the symptoms 
of which is too many "#ifdef WINDOWSNT" directives sprinkled throught the core 
modules.  In some aspects, though, we do have good separation, and this kind of 
separation should be encouraged, and it's good when developers can take 
advantage of it.