Re: Still unable to build trunk

[Jim Meyering <jim@meyering.net>]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

>> From: Jim Meyering <jim@meyering.net>
>> Cc: eggert@cs.ucla.edu, cyd@stupidchicken.com, jan.h.d@swipnet.se,
>> emacs-devel@gnu.org
>> Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2011 19:47:04 +0100
>>
>> Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> >> From: Jim Meyering <jim@meyering.net>
>> >> Cc: eggert@cs.ucla.edu, cyd@stupidchicken.com, jan.h.d@swipnet.se,
>> >> emacs-devel@gnu.org
>> >> Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2011 18:35:17 +0100
>> >>
>> >> Requiring the installation of a few commonly-used and very portable tools
>> >> does not make a steep curve.  It's more of a small, one-time investment.
>> >
>> > You forget about dependencies.
>>
>> Hardly.  The few programs we're talking about
>> (mainly just m4, automake and autoconf) have very few dependencies.
>
> You are talking about a specific example, while I'm talking about
> adding prerequisites in principle.

We are adding specific well-understood dependencies.
There is no need to worry about the complexities of adding additional,
theoretical dependencies.

>> People participating in emacs development (even if only building
>> from latest cloned sources) can be expected to follow a few simple
>> instructions.  If they have to rerun a few commands after someone
>> else upgrades their development system, that does not strike me as an
>> unreasonable burden, and certainly not as an exponentially heavy one.
>
> It's easy for us old-timers to say.  Not so easy for everyone else to
> follow suit.

I've tried to show (documentation, and successes with other projects)
that this is not a problem.  You persist in saying that it is.  Why?
Can you provide justification?

>> I see that you're using over 22GiB(!) there.
>> Remove just one of your many emacs-*.tar.gz files
>> and that will free far more space than any tiny tool
>> installation would consume.
>
> Please believe me that I need everything that I have there.

??
You must not realize that you have 11 gdb build directories,
each occupying up to 430 MiB.

Run du -csh gdb-*
That shows 3.1GiB just for those and their tarballs.
Access times suggest that many have been unused for a long time.

Run "make clean" in a few of those and you'll
remove plenty of cruft that hasn't been touched
for a few years.  I.e., do this:

    for i in gdb-*; do (test -d $i && cd $i && make clean); done

Most of the following tarballs are copies of released ones.
Why bother to keep them here?
With 5.2 and newer, you can just use or link to copies in this directory:
/srv/data/ftp-mirror/ftp/gnu/gdb/

    $ ls -1d gdb-*
    gdb-2.4+.aux.coff.tar.bz2
    gdb-2.5.3.tar.bz2
    gdb-2.8.1.tar.bz2
    gdb-3.1.tar.bz2
    gdb-3.3.tar.bz2
    gdb-3.4.tar.bz2
    gdb-3.5.tar.bz2
    gdb-4.0.1.tar.bz2
    gdb-4.11.tar.bz2
    gdb-4.12.tar.bz2
    gdb-4.13.tar.bz2
    gdb-4.14.tar.bz2
    gdb-4.16.tar.bz2
    gdb-4.17.tar.bz2
    gdb-4.18.tar.bz2
    gdb-4.1.tar.bz2
    gdb-4.2.tar.bz2
    gdb-4.3.tar.bz2
    gdb-4.4.tar.bz2
    gdb-4.5.tar.bz2
    gdb-4.6.tar.bz2
    gdb-4.7.tar.bz2
    gdb-4.8.tar.bz2
    gdb-4.9.tar.bz2
    gdb-6.0.tar.gz
    gdb-6.1/
    gdb-6.1.tar.gz
    gdb-6.2/
    gdb-6.2.tar.gz
    gdb-6.3/
    gdb-6.3.tar.gz
    gdb-6.4/
    gdb-6.4.tar.gz
    gdb-6.6/
    gdb-6.6.tar.bz2
    gdb-6.7.1/
    gdb-6.7.1.tar.bz2
    gdb-6.7.tar.bz2
    gdb-6.8/
    gdb-6.8.50.20090410/
    gdb-6.8.50.20090410.tar.bz2
    gdb-6.8.50.20090902.tar.bz2
    gdb-6.8.tar.bz2
    gdb-7.0/
    gdb-7.0.tar.bz2
    gdb-7.1/
    gdb-7.1.tar.bz2
    gdb-7.2/
    gdb-7.2.tar.bz2