Re: obby

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> Given the choice between reimplementing it from scratch and just using
> the existing library statically (at the expense of installation ease),
> I'd say use the library, assuming it's license-compatible with Emacs.
> The installation ease problem will go away entirely later if this is
> shipped with core Emacs, after all.  A from-scratch implementation would
> always lag, and that would probably be even more of a disincentive to
> beta users than installation difficulty would be!

The problem goes a bit further: most distributions, like Debian and
friends, will find it inconvenient to build their Emacs binary against
that library unless that library is small, or it's likely to already be
installed, or most Emacs users are likely to want to use it.
In the case of support for `obby', I don't know the size of the library,
but at least I don't expect most Emacs users to use it, and I don't
expect most installs to already have the library installed.
That's a significant problem for "static linking" (it's actually still
dynamically-linked by the way, altough the list of libraries thus linked
is known statically).


        Stefan