Re: CHECK_STRUCTS/dmpstruct.h mechanism is broken.

[Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>]

On 4/10/19 11:47 AM, Daniel Colascione wrote:
> Without CHECK_STRUCTS, we *will* break dumped
> Emacs in some subtle way sooner or later.

We're gonna break dumped Emacs in subtle ways no matter what. After all,
pdumper.c was broken in subtle ways when it was first introduced,
despite CHECK_STRUCTS. That's just life, and it's not the issue here.
The issue is whether the benefits of the CHECK_STRUCTS mechanism is
worth the hassle. In my experience it's definitely not worth it.

The more gingerbread we put into the Emacs build procedure, the more
it's off-putting to other potential developers (and the more work it is
for us). We already have too much build overhead (starting with
Autoconf! I hate Autoconf! It should go away!) and we should not neglect
its costs when looking at the benefits of a new hassle we add to the
build procedure. So far the benefits of CHECK_STRUCT have been zero in
the master, and the costs have been slowdown and significant annoyance
to the developer who's made the most changes to this part of the code.