Re: igc: trying to chase a crash

[Andrea Corallo <acorallo@gnu.org>]

Óscar Fuentes <ofv@wanadoo.es> writes:

> Andrea Corallo <acorallo@gnu.org> writes:
>
>>>> Yeah that's a great point!  For me building igc was not trivial.  MPS
>>>> doesn't come with distros and the experience of compiling it from source
>>>> wasn't great, the instructions in the codebase were conflicting plus I
>>>> had to manually patch the codebase as OOB was not compiling.  Finally
>>>> Emacs has to find it during compilation, otherwise I think it will
>>>> silently revert to the standard GC even if configured for it.
>>>> 
>>>> Maybe some of this is fixed now I'm not sure, but these are all hard
>>>> barriers for users, clear and detailed instructions would be much needed
>>>> for a more spread use of it.
>
> That reflects my experience as well.
>
> Figuring out what is needed is the long and frustrating part, by far.
> Once this is done, it's just a sligthly customized emacs build process.
>
>>> Wouldn't it perhaps be better to clone mps to savannah (with our patches) and add it as a sub-module to emacs? 
>>> Then initialize it if 'configure' is invoked with the --with-mps switch.
>>> If it were to become such a fundamental piece of emacs perhaps it would be better to be more independent.
>>
>> If we decide MPS needs to be forked I think would be more convenient to
>> have it directly inside the Emacs tree.
>>
>> BTW, I think if the user explicitly uses --with-mps the configuration
>> should fail if MPS is not available.
>
> +1000.
>
> I can't fathom why if I say --with-something the configure script can
> ignore my request and I must scroll up a wall of text to test if that
> was the case.

Yeah I don't know how much the current behavior of most flags was
intentional, I'm not in love with it as well, but I guess there's a
reason for it.

  Andtrea