Re: Making --with-wide-int the default

[Ulrich Mueller]

>>>>> On Sun, 15 Nov 2015, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

>> Date: Sat, 14 Nov 2015 18:38:37 +0100
>> From: Ulrich Mueller <address@hidden>
>> Cc: address@hidden, address@hidden, address@hidden, address@hidden,
>> address@hidden
>> 
>> In case you want any feedback from distros, Gentoo makes the option
>> available to users as the "wide-int" use flag, and the default is off.
>> I've not seen a single complaint from users that we should change that
>> default. (So most likely the Gentoo default will stay off, regardless
>> of what you decide to do with the upstream default.)

> Did the option you offer mention the fact that using it enlarges the
> maximum buffer and string size to (almost) 2GB? If not, it's quite
> possible that your users simply did not realize what this option would
> give them in user-level functionality, and treated it as yet another
> obscure build feature.

This is what we have as description:

   app-editors/emacs:wide-int - Prefer wide Emacs integers (typically
   62-bit). This option has an effect only on architectures where
   "long" and "long long" types have different size.

Seems that we copied the first sentence from Emacs' configure --help
output, which also doesn't say anything about buffer size or memory
footprint.

> Also, I must say it sounds strange to me that you wait for user
> complaints before you decide that some option should be on by default.

Well, Gentoo may be a bit special there, as we leave the choice
largely to the users. There are of course defaults (set in so-called
"profiles") for the most important flags. But users _will_ complain if
a default is completely unreasonable.

Unrelated question: Are the "62 bit" in the description above correct,
or should it rather be 61 bit?

Ulrich