Re: FYI: replacement for MODULES.html.sh

[Paul Eggert]

On 11/09/10 02:04, Bruno Haible wrote:
> (Jim and Paul don't have published their skill sets, but I guess
>   both of them have been doing more shell script programming than
>   Emacs Lisp programming lately.)

Although that's true, I have some Emacs Lisp programming skills
and wouldn't object to a useful program merely because it's written
in Emacs Lisp.

> - Emacs Lisp allows to define macros with abstraction. Downside:
>   Not standardized => the functions change in every Emacs release.
>   Still no lexical binding of variables (computer science progress
>   from 1970 to 1980 being ignored).

This is being a bit harsh.  Gnulib depends on several GNU tools,
such as Autoconf, that are not standardized and whose functions change
in every release.  And although I yield to no one in my preference for
static scoping, the fact that Emacs Lisp's scope rules are not as nice
as (say) Scheme's doesn't matter much for this application.

MODULES.html.sh is so slow that I no longer run it and I expect
that I'm not alone.  That's a problem, and it should be fixed
at some point.  If Thien-Thi's fix works reliably on GNU development
platforms, it would make sense to use it until somebody volunteers
to come up with a nicer fix.