Re: Emacs-devel Digest, Vol 52, Issue 61

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Miles Bader writes:

 > "Eric S. Raymond" <address@hidden> writes:
 > > I have been unable to work on vc.el for about *two weeks* now because
 > > the recommended "make maintainer-clean; configure; make bootstrap"
 > > consistently fails with this:
 > 
 > It never occurred to you to _say something_ during those "two weeks"?

This is starting to look like a duck hunt, what with Glenn just posted
that people who do say something are hurting his feelings.

Isn't it time to stop blaming the beta testers and subsystem
developers, who are *victims* of build breakage, whether it lies with
CVS or a recent change to a Makefile?  It's not so hard to add

.PHONY force-cvs-sanity-so-yall-will-kwitcherbitchin-for-heavens-sake
force-cvs-sanity-so-yall-will-kwitcherbitchin-for-heavens-sake:
        if test -e CVS -a ! -e .cvs_geeks_don_need_yer_steenkin_help; \
                then echo "I want to update CVS, type N to omit once"; \
                echo "type X to omit and inhibit permanently"; \
                echo "type anything else to 'cvs update -dP'"; \
                read -n 1 -t 5 NOCVSUPDATEDP; \
                case $NOCVSUPDATEDP in \
                        [nN] ) echo "Not updating CVS, continuing";; \
                        [xX] ) touch .cvs_geeks_don_need_yer_steenkin_help; \
                               echo "Consider 'update -dP' in ~/.cvsrc"; \
                               sleep 3;; \
                        *    ) echo "Logging to cvs-update.log"; \
                               cvs update -dP >cvs-update.log 2>&1;; \
                esac; \
                unset NOCVSUPDATEDP
        fi; fie; fo; fum

to the Makefile, is it?  And add it as a prerequisite for the
"bootstrap" target?  (I hereby dedicate the above stanza to the public
domain.  Don't cut and paste it, untabify probably got to it.<wink>)

A more radical suggestion: package system.  This is what a package
system is for, preventing propagation of local breakage into global
lossage.  D'oh.

I admit, I'm quite shocked that Alan and Eric didn't know about the
"update -d" flag, and rather surprised that this issue has not come up
in the same way for XEmacs, since our package tree is always in this
kind of flux.  The only thing is that we have a canonical reference,
http://www.xemacs.org/Develop/cvsaccess.html, for use of CVS, which
recommends putting "update -dP" in .cvsrc.[1]  Most places in XEmacs
docs that mention use of CVS point to that, so (I guess) most XEmacs
folks who use CVS have long since seen it and done it.

Footnotes: 
[1]  It may be that it happened in the great package reorganization,
and long since became part of the XEmacs culture.  But I don't recall
newbies to XEmacs development ever having much trouble with it, either.