[borkabrak]

I agree that a five-second startup can hardly be said to break usability, especially for something that many people will leave running for a long time.

That said, though, if I was accustomed to one of my primary tools taking a half-second to start, I think I'd miss it pretty bad if it went away.

Just the fact that people on both sides (glibc and emacs) are treating this so seriously seems to indicate a rather admirable dedication to keeping the quality of the software as high as possible.