Re: Why not zlib-compress-region?

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>
> Cc: aurelien.aptel+emacs@gmail.com,
>     sdl.web@gmail.com,
>     dmantipov@yandex.ru,
>     monnier@iro.umontreal.ca,
>     emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Sun, 29 Jun 2014 01:30:51 +0900
> 
> Eli Zaretskii writes:
> 
>  > I know about the package managers, I just wanted to make a point that
>  > AFAIU end-user Posix systems might well lack a compiler.  AFAIR, on
>  > non-free Posix systems, installing a compiler actually costs money.
> 
> Not on Mac OS X.  And how many important non-free POSIX systems aren't
> supported by GCC (not to mention The-Compiler-Suite-That-Shall-Not-Be-
> Mentioned-On-GNU-Channels)?

Again, building GCC is not something an end user would easily consider
when all she needs is to be able to use some plugin.

> The real problem for those is more likely whether there is an
> enterprise requirement for vetting all installed software.

Yes, that too.

> FFI implementations that *don't* require compilers have their
> problems, too, since Lisp types sometimes map to different C types for
> different libraries, which requires a lot of fiddly low-level
> knowledge on the part of the Lisp programmers that (if they stick to
> pure Lisp) they just don't need at all.  FFI == crashable Lisp.

Something to consider, I'm sure.  But that doesn't make the problem of
having to have a working compiler installation in any way.

>  > > usually without going through DLL hell
>  > 
>  > (This is unrelated.)  I don't believe in package managers as a
>  > means to avoid the "DLL hell".  Dependencies are written by people,
>  > which are prone to errors, and having several libFOO.so versions on
>  > the same system, even if their names don't conflict, is not fun.
> 
> I have a bunch of them (three versions of GTK, two of libpng for
> example).  I don't notice it at all

I have more than "a bunch" of them, too.  This is not about you or me,
you know.

>  > We are talking about the compiler and Binutils.  Building those,
>  > especially the former, is not for the faint at heart, not even on a
>  > Posix host.
> 
> Nonsense.  I do it about once a month, sometimes twice a week
> (automatically via Gentoo's Portage PMS, which always builds from
> source).

Again, this is not about you or me.