Re: Install C source code for for debugging help

[Paul Eggert]

On 9/26/19 10:07 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> Why do we need any change at all

We need it because the feature in question is not working on Debian, or on Red 
Hat, or on any other GNU/Linux distribution that I know of. It's all very well 
to say that the user can change the source-directory variable to some random 
location and then download a correct copy of the right version of the Emacs 
source to that location, but that can be a tricky thing to do correctly when the 
same home directory is shared by multiple Emacs versions (which is common for 
me, at least).

There is little justification to require users to do this this tricky extra work 
for each Emacs version that they use on each platform they run Emacs, when the 
source code in question could easily be made part of the Emacs distribution 
itself and when doing so helps promote the free-software goals of the GNU project.

> there were no complaints

I filed a bug report, and that is a complaint. The bug in question has been an 
annoyance for me for some time, as I often run the Emacs distributed as part of 
Ubuntu and/or Fedora. I finally got around to fixing the bug after noticing a 
related problem, and I doubt I'm the only one who'd welcome having the bug fixed.

The fix can wait until after Emacs 27 comes out of course. If master is that 
close to a release, perhaps it's time to create an emacs-27 branch.