Python 2 is very near end-of-life, and Python3-compatible changes to a
few scripts introduced compatibility problems with 2.7 again. It went
unnoticed for me since my system symlinks "python" to "python3", but
it broke the build on systems where that symlink is still python2. At
this point in time, I feel it is worth targetting modern Python and
forgetting about 2.7.
Non-reference AsciiDoc implementations such as AsciiDoctor (used by
GitHub) or even the simplistic parser in loccount choke up on these
characters for different reasons. AsciiDoctor doesn’t seem to even
parse them, displaying them as-is and not with emphasized text.
loccount would get hung up on possessives, expecting a terminating
character for emphasis that never comes.
Annoying, but easy to work around. the curly ’ character can be used
for possessives and _underscores_ can be used for emphasis.
The Windows section predated Freedoom’s removal of symbolic links.
After that, it’s not so necessary anymore for all the software to be
built with Cygwin (as that allowed them to handle symbolic links
correctly), but our use of Make still effectively demands at least
minimal Unix-ish capabilities.
Mike Swanson
NickZ