Re: Issues outstanding, redux (summary)

Adrian Aichner writes: Indeed. This is a very demoralizing situation. Mr. Preprocessor has an ambitious proposal to overhaul XEmacs' GC mechanism but seems to have lost interest in the pedestrian, boring task of maintaining dired. Dired-related patches seem to disappear into the Black Hole of Tuebingen. This certainly de-motivates people from attempting to make fixes to this code. Michael, if you no longer have time or volition to maintain this package, how about handing it off to someone else? But I fear that it's not just dired which is languishing. A month or so ago, when I first read Ben Wing's assertion that "XEmacs is in its death throes" my reaction was "How can he say that?". But the more I think about it, the more I tend to agree. What this project needs is strong leadership, of the sort that Steve Baur provided during the 20.x/21.x cycle. Right now it seems to be drifting aimlessly, with people making all sorts of destabilizing changes with no eye toward a release. Consider the number of hours wasted by new users getting tripped up by our package system, and by us having to answer their questions ("Well, see, you have to have some of the packages installed already before you can use the package system to install packages. Why don't you just forget about the packages and use the Sumo?"). Or the number of hours squandered on the massively destabilizing (and dubiously useful) "gutter" feature? Throw into the mix a partially working portable dumper which slows things down and introduces subtle new bugs. Sigh... it's hard to see how any of this is leading in any kind of postive direction... I think that it might just be time to push some of the "not-ready-for-prime-time" features into a new 21.3 version, and try to get a stable, working 21.2 out the door over the next few months. I think this would be a shot in the arm for the vitality of this project.