From: Carsten Dominik <carsten.dominik@gmail.com>
To: Michael Sperber <sperber@deinprogramm.de>
Cc: emacs-orgmode@gnu.org
Subject: Re: Re: Support (or not) for Emacs 21, and XEmacs
Date: Sun, 18 Apr 2010 16:03:42 +0200 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <3658A4B7-E30A-4D7A-9781-C97A01931A13@gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <y9ly6gl5fwh.fsf@deinprogramm.de>
Hi Michael,
On Apr 18, 2010, at 10:22 AM, Michael Sperber wrote:
>
> Hi Carsten,
>
> many thanks for your e-mail! (And many thanks for your work on
> org-mode, which is the best piece of software I've started using for a
> few years.)
>
> Carsten Dominik <carsten.dominik@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> However, I have recently more and more the feeling how having to
>> cater for several Emacs versions is a drag.
>
> I understand and would feel the same in your situation. So I was
> wondering if I could make it easy enough for you so org-mode could
> keep
> the XEmacs code in.
>
>> My feeling was also that the interest in the XEmacs side for
>> Org-mode is low. To my knowledge there is no Org-mode package for
>> XEmacs, and the number of user on the mailing list seems to be very
>> limited.
>
> Right. However, the reason why this is so is trivial: org-mode is
> GPLv3, and thus can't be a package for XEmacs, which is currently
> still
> GPLv2. (There has been a long and tedious discussion of this over in
> XEmacs land which I'd like to spare you from.) However, we've pretty
> much resolved the GPLv3 issues over the past few months, and I hope
> that
> we'll have a GPLv3 XEmacs very soon. At which point I'll personally
> make an XEmacs package.
>
>> So let me start with a question: Is XEmacs still alive, innovative?
>> There has been no major release (it seems to me) for a very long
>> time.
>> It was my feeling that the XEmacs project is on its way to a slow
>> death.
>> I may be wrong about this.
>
> Development, which was slow for a long time, has recently picked up
> significantly. Releases are a problem, I admit: The developers
> essentially all use the development branch, which is by now vastly
> different from the 21.4 release. (Also, the GPLv3 issue has kept us
> from being able to merge Emacs code for a long time.) But we'll do a
> release at some point.
>
>> You propose to help. One way to go would be to continue a branch
>> based on Org-mode 6.35, and to merge any new stuff into that branch.
>
> That's definitely a possibility.
>
>> So a dedicated XEmacs-related person could keep such an XEmacs.
>> In my test branch where I remove compatibility code (not only
>> XEmacs, but also Emacs 21, and I'd love to ditch support for
>> Emacs 22 - even though I cannot do that just yet), quite some code
>> has changed, and I am not sure how easy it would be to keep
>> a compatibility branch up to date.
>
> Is there any way to leave the compatibility code in place and not
> worry
> about it, so long as it does not interfere with your work on the
> current
> Emacs? (I don't know how big that interference is, I must admit.) I
> could then try to fix it up as development goes along.
Well,
here are some of the major annoyances for me:
1. posix character classes in regular expressions, thinks like [:alpha:]
These are nice because they work well with arbitrary languages.
Does XEmacs suppor these now?
2. The overlay API - I think XEmacs actually has a compatibility lib
for these, is that correct?
One of the things you could do it to figure out if I can also switch
to the API calls overlays-in and overlays-at in that library.
My own implementations are slightly different, and I am not sure I
can rely on the ones in the xemacs library.
3. outline.el. Last time looked, XEmacs still had the horrible old
outline.el which is pretty much impossible to program.
I do have a port, xemacs/noutline.el in the Org distribution - if
you
could get that into XEmacs, that would get rid of a major annoyance,
including complicated installation instructions.
4. Can you make XEmacs understand mouse-3 instead of button3 ? Or
maybe it does understand these by now?
If you would take it on yourself to make a package for XEmacs - that
would be helpful, because then I can remove special installation
instructions for XEmacs and just tell people to get the package.
I guess you could make such a package anyway - even if it currently
cannot get into the XEmacs distribution because of license discussions.
The compromise for me would be this:
- You fix the things above.
- I leave the rest of the necessary compatibility code in
- I program any new features with whatever is available
in Emacs 22/23 and rely on you to make it XEmacs compatible.....
Cheers
- Carsten
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2010-04-18 14:03 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 31+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2010-04-14 8:15 Support (or not) for Emacs 21, and XEmacs Carsten Dominik
2010-04-16 10:26 ` Carsten Dominik
2010-04-16 10:27 ` Carsten Dominik
2010-04-16 12:19 ` Matt Lundin
2010-04-16 16:41 ` Carsten Dominik
2010-04-16 13:03 ` Sebastian Rose
2010-04-16 13:13 ` Bernt Hansen
2010-04-16 14:39 ` Carsten Dominik
2010-04-16 14:42 ` Bernt Hansen
2010-04-16 14:42 ` Carsten Dominik
2010-04-16 19:15 ` Bernt Hansen
2010-04-16 22:02 ` Carsten Dominik
2010-04-16 13:32 ` Rémi Vanicat
2010-04-16 13:56 ` Sebastian Rose
2010-04-16 13:07 ` Jan Böcker
2010-04-16 13:47 ` Günter Kolousek
2010-04-17 15:39 ` Michael Sperber
2010-04-17 20:31 ` Carsten Dominik
2010-04-18 8:22 ` Michael Sperber
2010-04-18 14:03 ` Carsten Dominik [this message]
2010-04-19 11:00 ` Michael Sperber
2010-04-19 11:19 ` Michael Sperber
2010-04-19 15:51 ` Carsten Dominik
2010-04-19 15:54 ` Michael Sperber
2010-04-19 15:55 ` Carsten Dominik
2010-04-19 15:59 ` Carsten Dominik
2010-05-07 7:51 ` Carsten Dominik
2010-05-07 8:30 ` Michael Sperber
2010-05-07 9:21 ` Carsten Dominik
2010-04-23 15:50 ` Michael Sperber
2010-04-23 19:03 ` Carsten Dominik
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