Re: [ANNOUNCE] Emacs 26.1 released

[Bob Friesenhahn <bfriesen@simple.dallas.tx.us>]

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On Thu, 31 May 2018, Yuri Khan wrote:

> On Thu, May 31, 2018 at 10:35 PM Bob Friesenhahn
> <bfriesen@simple.dallas.tx.us> wrote:
>
>> Developers should be cognizant of the packages they are requiring to
>> be used.
>
> It’s not so easy. A library can be packaged under one name in Debian
> and a slightly different name in Red Hat, or distributed as one vs.
> multiple packages, or carried by one distribution but not the other.
> So, the error message that lists a missing library or header is pretty
> much the best you can get without delving into those differences.

The task of maintaining a configure script is definitely not easy. 
The benefits of making the configure script as user-friendly as 
possible is that then more users are using the latest version rather 
than a stale version provided by their operating system distribution.

In this case the configure.ac developer explicitly entered a 
pkg-config package name (including its major version) and so it was a 
developer decision to produce a specific pkg-config package name but 
used an indistinct generic meaningless name ("WEBKIT") in configure 
output that the user sees, as well as the terminal error message.

The project is able to maintain 1.1 million lines of lisp code and 
293k lines of ANSI C code which are presumably mostly correct, so it 
should be possible to suitably maintain the 5k lines of configure.ac 
code as so that ordinary end users are able to compile emacs as well.

Bob
-- 
Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen@simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/