Re: with-pgtk: C-; turns into plain ';'

[Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Po Lu <luangruo@yahoo.com>
>> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org,  raman@google.com
>> Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2022 21:45:45 +0800
>> 
>> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
>> 
>> > Should this be in NEWS (and perhaps also in PROBLEMS)?
>> 
>> The NEWS entry seems fine (it already mentions that it's for Wayland and
>> Broadway)
>
> IMNSHO, not explicitly enough:
>
>   ** Emacs now supports being built with pure GTK.
>   To use this option, make sure the GTK 3 and Cairo development files
>   are installed, and configure Emacs with the option '--with-pgtk'.
>   Unlike the default X and GTK build, the resulting Emacs binary will
>   work on any underlying window system supported by GDK, such as
>   Wayland and Broadway.
>
> No matter how many times I re-read this, I fail to understand that it
> tells me not to use it on X, and it definitely doesn't warn me of any
> downsides if I do.  A word of warning is definitely in order there.

Yes, I would agree. 

This is likely going to be problematic. A number of GNU Linux distros
are now defaulting to Wayland (e.g. fedora) and others have flagged
tgheir intention to follow suit (Ubuntu, Debian). 

Where this could become problematic is if distro maintainers don't
realise there are downsides with a pgtk build under X. In this
situation, they are likely to only bundle a pgtk and non-GUI versions
rather than a pgtk, X and non-GUI versions. 

If we make the issues associated with pgtk, X and input methods
explicit, distributions which want to support wayland and X will be more
likely to include both wayland (pgtk) and X binary packages. 

As distributions which do support wayland typically also make it easy to
select/switch desktop environments, it is probably also important users
are aware of the input method issues with pgtk under X as it means that
when they switch from wayland to X, they also need to know to switch
which build of Emacs they run. Failure to adequately communicate this
will likely result in numerous unresolvable bug reports.