Re: [Emacs-diffs] master 085c7f6 2/2: Test format-time-string with zone arg

[Paul Eggert]

On 05/02/2017 02:55 PM, Bruno Haible wrote:
> it would be good to know what qualms you have with the msvc-nothrow
> module. Should Emacs be built with mingw, not MSVC? Is an EBADF situation never
> going to occur in Emacs anyway? Are the portability efforts for mingw and MSVC
> in Gnulib useless for Emacs, because on native Windows Emacs uses its own w32.c
> instead anyway? Does Emacs have other requirements I don't know about?

I know little about MS-Windows. Emacs has gotten along without 
msvc-nothrow and msvc-inval for quite some time and so may not need 
them.  Adding them to Emacs may break MS-Windows builds in subtle ways 
that I am not qualified to judge. So, being cautious, I omitted them.

There was a similar issue with the recent Gnulib changes for 
daylight-saving time in MS-Windows, where I omitted the relevant modules 
from Emacs because Emacs has been running for years without these DST 
fixes and I worried that adding the new Gnulib modules would break 
and/or complicate the Emacs build unnecessarily.

It should be easy enough for someone with MS-Windows expertise to 
experiment with the new Gnulib functionality in Emacs: in the Emacs 
master branch, edit admin/merge-gnulib's AVOIDED_MODULES variable so 
that it no longer lists the modules you want to use. Then run 
admin/merge-gnulib and build the result on MS-Windows.

> 1) The Emacs w32.c ports to Windows98 as well, whereas Gnulib currently assumes
> Windows XP at least (and will soon move to Windows 7, I guess - namely when
> no one has a test machine with Windows XP any more). Merit or demerit? Opinion?

In the past Eli has argued for supporting ancient MS-Windows and MS-DOS 
versions. I don't know whether he still cares. (By "ancient" I mean that 
Microsoft itself no longer supports them.)