Re: Still unable to build trunk

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Jim Meyering <address@hidden>
> Cc: address@hidden,  address@hidden,  address@hidden,  address@hidden
> Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2011 18:35:17 +0100
> 
> Requiring the installation of a few commonly-used and very portable tools
> does not make a steep curve.  It's more of a small, one-time investment.

You forget about dependencies.  And about upgrading from time to time.
With every additional prerequisite, the burden gets exponentially more
heavy.  And it's certainly not on-time.

> > Even core Emacs maintainers have trouble with these prerequisites, for
> > any number of reasons (e.g., Autoconf installed on fencepost is too
> > old for what Paul added to the Emacs tree, so until the GNU admins
> > upgrade that at my request, I cannot build the current tree).
> 
> Run the script below on fencepost, following the instructions
> in its --help, and you should be good to go.

It's not my system, so I don't want private installation of
everything.  My home directory there is already one of the hugest.  I
was asked by sysadmins to go through them in cases such as this one,
in order to avoid bloating my home directory even more.

Anyway, this is just an example of why adding more prerequisites is
not something to do easily, IMO.

> > Imagine
> > what will happen to people with less experience and grey hair,
> > especially if they do that on systems they don't own.
> 
> It is most definitely a trade-off, but afaik, one that we have
> managed well with coreutils, diffutils, gzip, grep, parted, etc.
> On those projects, no one has reported trouble with the build process
> for some time.

I don't know if the comparison is valid.  More importantly, the fact
that the addition is due to syncing a couple of functions with gnulib
is troublesome -- it sounds like a tail that wags the dog.