> Since my Makefile branch was merged I've been getting flak for breaking > certain setups. Now, the change didn't actually break them, but I did > make (perhaps foolishly) a deliberate decision to make that particular > breakage fatal rather than silent. It would be very easy to continue to > paper over the breakage and pretend things are working when they're not. > What irritates me greatly is that quite a few of the people that insist > on this "solution" are the ones who would have to deal with the > Heisenbugs thus introduced. So let me explain once more what is broken: >
Hmm. I was biten by the makefile change but hopefully my report didn't count as "flak". I have absolutely no problem with any reasonable change in the makefile. But your description of the situation before and after the makefile change is not entirely correct. Before: May be I had a broken setup and didn't know. Nevertheless it worked. After: May be conceptually your new makefile improved the build process. But now my setup was broken. ;-) And here comes the moment when you just wanted to do some routine work, namely publish some notes for the upcoming lecture, normally a one minute job, well set-up and tested. And all you get is some error. Time is ticking away, next org-mode scheduled APPT in 5 min. We all know this. My guess: It was too easy to miss that action was required on a user's side. May be a hint that make targets changed and that under some circumstances make update could fail and a hint with some exclamation marks that batch exporting now requires --load org-install.el and not only --load org.el would have reduced mail traffic a lot. If there was such a note at least I missed it. Definitely keep up your work and improve the build process! I'm happy to change my scripts if I know I need to and better still if I understand why I should! (Thx for your explanation!) Detlef