Re: Multi-tty design (Re: Reordering etc/NEWS)

[Karoly Lorentey]

David Kastrup wrote:
> Karoly Lorentey <address@hidden> writes:
>>> We simply can not reach a common ground if you keep
>> discarding my entire viewpoint and use-cases.
> 
> I don't see that I do.  Presenting existing use-cases and problems
> with them does not mean that I discard your views and approaches.  It
> just means that I don't consider them optimal.

I want to make it clear that I'm not angry at you, just tired of the
argument.  I believe I have said everything I had to say on the topic of
environment variables, and I simply don't think that continuing this
conversation will help us advance towards a mutually satisfactory
solution.  My position is already available in the archives.

I'll let you implement any solution that is acceptable to you.  I
promise I won't mind.  Meanwhile, we can move on to discuss some other
topics.

User feedback will help us decide what (if anything) needs to be changed
later.  We are talking about some 50-100 lines of well-separated code,
so it's not like it is going to be much work to experiment with
alternative implementations.

I'm sorry if it is unusual or impolite to just give up arguing like
that.  It is now clear to me that you care much more about how
environments behave than I do.

>> Explain it in a single short sentence then.
>
> The environment passed to processes consists of the values in the
> terminal-local variable terminal-process-environment and those of the
> global variable process-environment, with values in
> terminal-process-environment taking priority.

This sounds just peachy.  Would you like to implement it?

>> Clearly I won't convince you by repeating the same arguments over
>> and over, and you will definitely not convince me either.
> 
> A pity if you disregard the existing typical use cases.

I didn't disregard them.  But they were written with strictly
single-terminal sessions in mind.  I feel it is entirely acceptable to
require them to be changed to take advantage of the new multi-terminal
feature set.

But our discussion on environments really leads nowhere fast, so let's
slightly change the subject, and talk a little more about the "future
compatibility" of existing packages.

You did not react to my observation on how all existing code that looks
at `window-system' during load time breaks in multi-terminal sessions.
`window-system' is frame-local on the multi-tty branch and there is
*really* a lot of code that relies on it having a global binding.
People whose .emacs mentions window-system are likely affected as well.
 Again, single-terminal sessions continue to work fine, but in
multi-terminal sessions, these packages break with various levels of
spectacularity.

I don't think we should even attempt to implement convoluted heuristics
to have these packages still somehow work fine in multi-terminal
sessions.  Would you agree?

-- 
Karoly

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