Re: Building 22.1, on Ubuntu

[David Kastrup]

Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@ceid.upatras.gr> writes:

> On 2007-09-09 10:47, Dave Pawson <dave.pawson@gmail.com> wrote:
>>On 08/09/2007, Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@ceid.upatras.gr> wrote:
>>> As for improving Emacs, it may not be easy to list the package names
>>> of dozens, hundreds of GNU/Linux distributions, or even other OS
>>> systems.  I commonly build Emacs on Solaris and BSD systems too, for
>>> example, and `xaw3dg-dev' doesn't really mean anything useful there.
>>> But that's a very interesting idea to explore a bit :)
>>
>> I'll collect my findings on my site when I've finished.
>
> Nice.  IMHO, that's exactly the free software spirit that we should
> foster in communities like the Emacs' users community.

I don't agree: as a package maintainer, it is _one_ major source of
irritation if people who can't be bothered to read the installation
instructions then put up a web site with their personal take on how
things should work.  10 years later, still people use those
instructions to paint themselves into a corner and complain on mailing
lists and newsgroups how broken things are.

If a user figures out something that is missing in the documentation,
he should contribute to the _upstream_ documentation instead of
creating _another_ incomplete inaccurate experience report that will
work, if you are lucky, on one particular platform with one particular
version if at all, possibly breaking a number of things in the process
that the report creator was not aware of.

_If_ there is something wrong with the upstream documentation, helping
to fix it is _much_ more important and helpful than putting up another
thing in competition.  Scattering partial information of inscrutable
quality all around the web helps nobody.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum