Re: FYI: "Emacs and XEmacs" on the Emacs Wiki
"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen(a)xemacs.org> writes:
Vladimir G. Ivanovic writes:
> This may be old news, but just I stumbled upon this:
>
> http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs-en/EmacsAndXEmacs
Seems mostly true, except for the damned lie about "failed attempt at
an aggressive take-over". The funny thing is that Jamie never wanted
to be Emacs maintainer, and neither did anybody else at Lucid.
Jamie has excerpts from the mailing lists at
<URL:http://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html>;. It is my personal opinion
that you need a solid pack of blinders in view of the following message
(and others in its ilk) to call RMS' version a "damned lie". It was
quite clearly spelled out that Lucid would only do merge work if they
were in complete control of the resulting Emacs. And it never really
was an option that the merge work could be done by people outside the
Zawinski/Wing circle: code and documentation quality was not sufficient
for outsider work. Heck, not even the current XEmacs maintainers get
along all too well managing that code.
So yes, the options were either let the Lucid people take over control
of Emacs development, or not get a merge because of unavailable
sustainable technical expertise. Jamie spells this out quite
explicitly, and Richard took his pick.
In my opinion, prudently even when putting aside political issues and
only considering the technical ones: it would have put Emacs development
at the mercy of those few understanding the code, and that actually has
turned out to be a bottleneck for XEmacs these days.
I recommend to anybody interested in the story to read the other mails
Jamie puts up. It is a story of incurable differences, not one of
heroes and liars, as you choose to see it.