Re: [VETO] Re: XEmacs-21.4.5 info-look; sync with Emacs-21.1

SY> All the more reason to encourage the use of the nifty things SY> that XEmacs can do. Once they get used to it, you never know, SY> some of them might switch to XEmacs completely. :-) "extents.el" (or an improved "lucid.el") might do the trick. Making things more painful for people who built their package on GNU first will just encourage Kinnucan-Kastrup-Templeton-Zimmerman-ism: "OK, I'll just tell people that if they want XYZ-mode to work they have to use Emacs." SY> We do believe that extents are better than overlays don't we? SY> In that case shouldn't we be aiming for 100% use? We _have_ 100% _use_. There are no overlays in XEmacs, only a deprecated API for extents named 'overlay'. SJT> The packages are not "us", they're mostly third-party. In SJT> many cases originally developed and still maintained by GNU SJT> Emacs people for GNU Emacs. SY> My mature response: So. Whatever; you're the one who has to maintain those gratuitous differences if nobody else does. SJT> VM does use extents on XEmacs. SY> OK, now I don't know what you meant when you referred to Kyle. SY> What was your point? Seems to me like you've shot your own SY> argument. Or am I missing something? Maybe. The point is that there are no overlays in XEmacs anyway. Just a compatibility interface. I'm suggesting that we should clean up the one we have in overlay.el and undeprecate it. We should also improve "extents.el" and encourage developers to use the extent interface. But in terms of developer relations, we get the most !/A$ by undeprecating the overlay.el API. SJT> But the compatibility API uses the _name_ "overlay", and of SJT> course on GNU Emacs the VM functionality is implemented using SJT> overlays. SY> Which is fair enough, isn't it? Yes. So why make these people reinvent the wheel? Why have over a dozen implementations of overlays with different APIs (ie, prefixes on the function and variable names), perhaps even with slightly different prototypes in some cases? We could probably cut that to a very few, most of which would be XEmacs-origin packages whose developers would be more than happy to distribute, even help develop, a robust extents.el for GNU mainline. -- Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Don't ask how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software.