> Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2011 13:24:11 -0800 > From: Paul Eggert <egg...@cs.ucla.edu> > CC: c...@stupidchicken.com, bug-gnulib@gnu.org, monn...@iro.umontreal.ca, > emacs-de...@gnu.org > > On 01/25/11 11:02, Eli Zaretskii wrote: > > > To read the instructions, you need to unpack the archive first. > > That may have been true years ago, when the tarballs themselves were > the main way that one could find out how to do maintenance. But that > long ago stopped being true for Emacs. If I wanted to come up to > speed on how to build Emacs for MS-DOS, the first thing I'd do would > be a Google search, which would point me at places like > <http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs-fr/EmacsForDOS> and > <http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/MS_002dDOS.html>. > If these places contain extraction instructions, that's good enough.
And what about the emacs-25.chg file? Would you expect users to google for it as well, and copy-paste it into their shell window? I hope you will agree that it's a very bad idea. So the file will have to be extracted first, and you are back at the same problem as with the instructions again. > For example, it should be pretty easy to check emacs-25.chg > automatically; is that done with GDB? Yes, it is done. But it doesn't catch all the errors. More importantly, the remapping file is maintained manually. See my response to Stefan. > > If the decision is not to rename these few files in the Emacs > > distribution, and instead ask me to cope with these complications, I > > will understand that the knee-jerk reaction of too many members of > > this community when they hear "MS-DOS" is more important that any > > voice of reason > > I hope that you don't include me in members whose knees are jerking. I no longer know who is and who isn't. Oscar's was the only message that sounded like a glimpse of light in the darkness. > Personally I would just rename the files in gnulib and be done with > it, as none of the name changes seem to be onerous. However, we don't > seem to have consensus for that now; I seem to be the only gnulib > developer who would go that route. We are talking about renaming files in the Emacs repo. Why would gnulib developers have any say in that? > Also, the problem of non-8+3 file names does not seem to be limited > to gnulib-derived files. Yes, they are limited to gnulib-derived files. If you mean Org, I'm sure those files will be renamed. > All in all it sounds like automating the renaming on the MS-DOS side > would be a reasonable thing to do. Theoretically, yes. It sounded like that years ago, when it was introduced into GDB. I feel much better now, thank you. > This is a bit of work but doesn't seem that hard. And if we get the > automation working well with Emacs we could then apply similar ideas > to GDB as well, and make GDB development less error-prone on MS-DOS. Who is "we" here, I wonder.
