Re: W32 version crashes on C-g

[Juanma Barranquero]

On 3/18/06, Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> wrote:

> Please feel free to suggest such refinements.

You only have to take a look at Lennart's EmacsW32 pages to see which
kinds of things aren't easy for beginners, and are not described in
nt/INSTALL.

> It's supposed to be, and I think it comes close.

As you say, it is a step-by-step guide to building Emacs, but not to
set up a working environment, and that's what causes trouble. Of
course once you've got every needed tool, building Emacs is easy.

> I disagree.  When I first built Emacs on Windows, I didn't need
> anything except setting up a working development environment.

I repeat: setting up the environment is the hardest part. Even if the
user is a developer, if he happens to have tools from GnuWin32, Cygwin
and MinGW in his PATH (it's happened to me a couple times), you can
get mysterious errors while running make, for example.

> (The only issue was
> the 3rd party image libraries that had incompatible headers.
> But that's hardly a problem with Emacs.)

But I'm not talking about "problems with Emacs", just problems for a
user to download the source tarball and turn it into a working Emacs
binary. Incompatible headers, or libraries (the image libraries have
quite a few dependencies) can be daunting for the inexperienced.

Or, to put it in another way: Kim can hardly be considered a newbie,
and it's clear that he could have set up a working environment and
compiled Emacs, given a little time. But he hadn't the time, he looked
at nt/INSTALL and did not find what he needed. Whether that's a
problem in contents or presentation, I don't know.

> I didn't need any bravery.

You're more resourceful that I am :-)

> I find it very simple, perhaps because the first thing I do is
> download GCC, Binutils, and every other ported GNU package (Coreutils,
> Sed, Grep, Gawk, Make, Texinfo, Diffutils, and Patch) one needs for
> decent development.

Perhaps. I've been developing on Windows for years and didn't need
most of that, until I started hacking Emacs; so your definition of
"decent development" and mine are dissimilar.

--
                    /L/e/k/t/u