Re: Emacs vista build failures

[Richard M Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

    It is a failure of the GNU project and of the free software movement
    that there is so much emphasis on monolithic distributions and binary
    package distributions.   It is a failure of the GNU project and the free
    software movement that one so often encounters distros that offer to
    not install source trees and even offer to not install development
    environments.

The words "it is a failure of" are ambiguous.  They could literally
mean "it is a goal we have not achieved", but they also suggest
placing the blame for this on us.

Certainly these are goals we have not achieved, but if others do not
follow our recommendations, that's their decision, not ours.  When I
designed the GNU specs for configuring and building source packages, I
hoped that free software developers generally would adopt them, but
they did not.

I tried at one point to convince XFree86 to support the GNU
configuration spec.  I even found a volunteer to implement that as a
wrapper around their existing configuration mechanism.  But they did
not consider such compatibility very important, and I don't think they
installed this wrapper.

To convince free software projects generally to adopt this spec
would require more pressure from the community in general.

It is easy to call names (such as calling the GNU Coding Standards
"anemic"), but given that many programs' developers won't even
implement those, I doubt we would obtain much compliance for stricter
ones.