Re: Why not zlib-compress-region?

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>
> Date: Sat, 28 Jun 2014 21:51:46 +0900
> Cc: aurelien.aptel+emacs@gmail.com, dmantipov@yandex.ru, emacs-devel@gnu.org,
> 	Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>, sdl.web@gmail.com
> 
> Eli Zaretskii writes:
> 
>  > Isn't it true that lately most Posix systems, including GNU/Linux, are
>  > by default packaged without a development environment?
> 
> Yes, but GNU/Linux package managers (among other free software package
> managers) generally include development dependencies in their
> databases, so anybody who is not in a high-security situation (where
> management has a short list of libraries you can use) can fairly
> easily acquire the necessary dependencies

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.
So having an FFI implementation that requires a compiler might be a
disadvantage on Posix systems as well.

> 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.

> (still building your own everything, right, Eli?)

Not everything, just things no one built, or built in a broken way.
The compiler and Binutils are definitely not my build.

> There are minor annoyances, but not so much as to deter people who
> aren't afraid to type "./configure; make; make install".

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.

> I've given up more times than I can count (temporarily of course,
> when I've got a wekk of evenings free I get back to it) on putting
> together Windows dev environments, though.

It's not that hard, actually, especially if there's no need to run the
configure scripts (as I'd imagine will happen when Emacs supports some
kind of FFI).