Re: Emacs vista build failures

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Johannes Weiner <hannes@saeurebad.de>
>> Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2008 20:37:17 +0200
>> Cc: lord@emf.net, rms@gnu.org, drobinow@gmail.com, emacs-devel@gnu.org,
>> 	acm@muc.de, Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>
>> 
>> To be honest, I couldn't give the slightest about w32.  It's a pile of
>> crap that should have never seen the light of day, all political issues
>> left aside and I, FWIW, would not consider it when designing software.
>
> Such arrogant nonsense can only be forgiven if it's spoken out of
> utter ignorance.  Last time you took a good look at a Windows system
> was probably in 1998.  Wake up! a lot has changed since then.
> Nowadays, w32 systems don't fall short of Gnu/Linux in any aspect:
> stability, usability, user-friendliness, etc.

There is no reliable way to quote stuff you want to pass into a "system"
call.  In fact, it is not even guaranteed that calling "exec" will not
mesh up arguments or add or remove quoting.

For a programmer, this is a situation nothing short of ridiculous.

> And the current trend in Gnu/Linux systems to mimic the Windows UI,
> feel, and touch bring more and more the worst parts of Windows to
> Gnu/Linux systems, to the degree that in a very near future they will
> be indistinguishable, anyway.

The UI is one thing: at least this has been through usability labs.  But
the misbegotten programming APIs have not had the same blessing.  And
the degree to which they are messed up at times is utterly amazing to
the unprepared observer.

There are consequences: for example, call-process and its ilk don't work
reliably.  You can't expect the arguments given to them to actually make
it unmolested to the argc/argv of the called program's "main".

And that is not good.  In my book, there is hardly an excuse for such
misbehavior.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum