Re: Org Build System (aka Makefile)

[Eric Schulte <eric.schulte@gmx.com>]

>> I know we disagree about this: you think that compiler warnings are for
>> the developers, not for the users.  I think the default "make" should
>> send as much warnings as Emacs sends with its own default "make".
>
> You continue to misunderstand what I was saying or at least trying to
> say.  The primary function of Org's build system is to, well, build Org
> with the minimum fuzz.  That's what it was designed to do and that is
> what it does — it can do other things as well, but you'll have to
> configure it to do that.
>
> Getting more warnings is a secondary function, however useful they might
> be.

But we certainly shouldn't (and currently aren't?) inhibit the display
of any warnings when the default make is run.  I was surprised to run
make compile-source and see additional warnings which weren't shown
during regular make.  What is the difference between "make" and "make
compile-source" which results in different warnings?

> Now, Emacs Lisp as a dynamic language is notoriously difficult in the
> static checks department (warnings are but a small part of that) and
> Emacs lacks functions to do this thoroughly in an automated manner.
> There is _no_ complete tool for doing dependency checks at the source
> level (I'd love to be proved wrong) for instance.  Emacs does have
> elint since version 23, which is properly separated from building, but
> again, is still incomplete.  I've added two compilation methods that
> use elint, but they certainly aren't for casual use — the first one
> takes 25 times as long as a simple build and the other one 275 times.
>

After some time digging through the make files, it looks to me like one
must edit the local.mk file to run these.  I'd propose that they are
added as a separate Makefile target (mentioned by "make help") so that
they can be easily run.  Very few people (users or developers) are
willing to edit make configuration files.

Perhaps these elint build options should be used to build when "make
check" is run.  If a user is willing to run the test suite they should
be willing to endure a slower build for more thorough warnings.

Best,

-- 
Eric Schulte
http://cs.unm.edu/~eschulte