Re: Emacs vista build failures

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Johannes Weiner <hannes@saeurebad.de>
>> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
>> Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2008 05:41:39 +0200
>> 
>> What is your point?
>
> That if you put politics aside, there's nothing left to make GNU/Linux
> be much better than Windows.  Politics is what makes it stand out.

I've programmed both extensively.  And Windows really is a time sink
with its wagonload of inconsistencies.  The company I am currently
working with is rather Windows-centric.  After about half a year of
offering our main product on Windows as well, we abandoned the effort.
The level of inconsistencies and problems when doing, say, batch file
programming is really staggering, and we were continually getting
tripped up by further little niceties and problems.

Just a small example (stripped to the part of interest):

REM Get current directory
set targetdir=%CD%

REM %targetdir% has to be postprocessed since if it is a root directory,
REM it will end in a backslash which escapes a double quote when calling
REM Java.  So we append a single dot in that case.
for %%l in (%targetdir%) do if "%%~pnl" == "\" (set targetdir=%targetdir%.)

call ant.bat -Dinstaller.path="%targetdir%"


Can you imagine how many mandays get wasted on utterly appalling
workarounds like that?  And of course, this just works on one version of
cmd.exe, and might break on another.

Bourne shell programming is _much_ more consistent, regular, and simple.
Quite fewer commands, quite more uniform constructs, quite more power,
quite fewer exceptions and bad surprises.

And that's when I am talking about seventies level Bourne shell
programming.

Of course, Windows bashing has become a popular sport.  But it is not
all politics and arbitrary.  There are reasons, technical reasons (not
"just" that it is unfree) that Windows gets bashed and loathed.  After
all, there _are_ non-free Unix versions a dime (or was that a million?)
a dozen.

And it is not just a _different_ design that is getting the heat, but
pretty much the absence of much of a design and stupidity and
awkwardness that is hobbling productivity in utterly staggering ways.

This list certainly is not the place to discuss the presence or absence
of merits in Windows.  But if we get a bit more Emacs-specific and you
take a look at conditional code being used when under all sort of UNIX
systems and code being used when under w32, then take a good look at
what code is more complex and awkward.

-- 
David Kastrup