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

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Sun, 15 Nov 2015 22:04:46 +0100
> Cc: address@hidden, address@hidden, address@hidden, address@hidden,
>         address@hidden
> From: Ulrich Mueller <address@hidden>
> 
> >>>>> 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.

Fair enough, but then we must agree that the lack of complaints
probably says nothing at all about your users' preferences in this
matter.

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

62, including the sign bit.  Try this:

  M-: (- most-positive-fixnum) RET

and then look at the hex representation.