Re: Fwd: sign off on XEmacs 21.5
"Vladimir G. Ivanovic" <vgivanovic(a)comcast.net> writes:
on 07/02/2008 12:56 PM David Kastrup said the following:
> Papering over with propaganda the gap between XEmacs release
> standards and procedures and the current 21.5 state is not a
> sustainable substitute for development.
>
> There is a saying "It is better to be quiet and thought of as a fool
> than to speak and remove all doubt". I don't think that declaring
> 21.5 release quality will convince people that XEmacs is the best
> offering to be had. They'll see it as an opportunity to compare.
I don't know where you're coming from, or why,
I am an Emacs developer and maintainer of AUCTeX. You are probably
aware that the AUCTeX version distributed by XEmacs is years old and
missing a lot of functionality. You are probably also aware that
upstream AUCTeX provides a ready-made working uptodate XEmacs package
that the XEmacs developers refuse to distribute citing "quality control"
policies. You might also be aware that bugs repeatedly reported to
XEmacs developers have gone unfixed for a number of years. For example,
XEmacs still fails to be able to use the :file descriptor in image
specificators for non-ASCII image types (meaning pretty much all except
XPM) when dired gets loaded because it then starts loading those images
in non-binary modes.
Supporting XEmacs against the apathy of XEmacs developers, the general
lack of code quality, documentation and functionality has been an uphill
battle and a drain of resources.
In contrast, Emacs developers are fast to respond to bugs and helpful.
That is where I am coming from and why I am unwilling to let propaganda
not based on reality go by without comment.
but it does seem as if your postings are primarily negative in
tone. It would be nice if you could say something positive about
something or someone.
How about telling that to Steve Baur? He was the one saying "Children
are our most precious resource and always remember that a mind is a
terrible thing to waste on something like FSF Emacs 22 or vim." To
stoop to that level, I would have to talk about something like
"cropped-Wing XEmacs". And anyway, a mind is a terrible thing to waste
on anything, and I have wasted months on the defective interfaces and
documentation of XEmacs. You are not doing anybody a favor by flushing
the next version out the door without applying basic consistency and
quality control to both code and documentation. In particular not the
purported target demographic.
Anyway, from my point of view, XEmacs 21.5 could be released without
us getting egg on our face. Yes, there are a few rough edges, but it
is a huge program (and all those OLPC children out there are waiting)
and a few rough edges in something as large as XEmacs are to be
expected.
I use XEmacs daily, and I'm satisfied with its quality level. I speak
of a mon-Mule, Linux build only. I hope people who use different
builds pipe up with any release blockers.
You'll find that most from "all those OLPC children" use languages and
texts that don't work all too well with non-MULE builds.
Afrikaans contains non-Latin-1 letters IIRC, for example.
--
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum
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