Re: igc: trying to chase a crash

[Óscar Fuentes]

Andrea Corallo <acorallo@gnu.org> writes:

>>> Yeah that's a great point!  For me building igc was not trivial.  MPS
>>> doesn't come with distros and the experience of compiling it from source
>>> wasn't great, the instructions in the codebase were conflicting plus I
>>> had to manually patch the codebase as OOB was not compiling.  Finally
>>> Emacs has to find it during compilation, otherwise I think it will
>>> silently revert to the standard GC even if configured for it.
>>> 
>>> Maybe some of this is fixed now I'm not sure, but these are all hard
>>> barriers for users, clear and detailed instructions would be much needed
>>> for a more spread use of it.

That reflects my experience as well.

Figuring out what is needed is the long and frustrating part, by far.
Once this is done, it's just a sligthly customized emacs build process.

>> Wouldn't it perhaps be better to clone mps to savannah (with our patches) 
>> and add it as a sub-module to emacs? 
>> Then initialize it if 'configure' is invoked with the --with-mps switch.
>> If it were to become such a fundamental piece of emacs perhaps it would be 
>> better to be more independent.
>
> If we decide MPS needs to be forked I think would be more convenient to
> have it directly inside the Emacs tree.
>
> BTW, I think if the user explicitly uses --with-mps the configuration
> should fail if MPS is not available.

+1000.

I can't fathom why if I say --with-something the configure script can
ignore my request and I must scroll up a wall of text to test if that
was the case.