Re: future of quail
Julian Bradfield <jcb+xeb(a)jcbradfield.org> writes:
On 2011-02-15, David Kastrup <dak(a)gnu.org> wrote:
> Julian Bradfield <jcb+xeb(a)jcbradfield.org> writes:
>> Such as distributed closed-source software and charging for licensing?
>
> Oh, that's normal with proprietary software licenses? Interesting. So
Yes. You want to use a widget kit for your proprietary software, you
go and buy a developers' licence for a proprietary widget set. It will
allow you to distribute and sell your software under your own terms,
Including complete readable source code for the whole application
including the widget set?
So that porting to any other platform is a matter of recompiling?
> So what point is there in throwing around bad insinuation which
_you_
> know to be inappropriate?
It's called "bonding". Mutual disparagement is a common technique,
at least among males (*are* there any women on this list?).
I am grateful to Stephen that he worked on banning that kind of bonding
from XEmacs web sites and documentation. And it was definitely harming
XEmacs because it was teaching attitudes that led to bad blood when
XEmacs developers needed to communicate with upstream. I've witnessed
several communications ending up horribly bad to the detriment of XEmacs
because of the consequences of this bonding.
Listen in any playground, locker-room or club. Disparaging outsiders
is an even commoner one, especially the "outsiders" from the next
village - that's why the XEmacs source is stuffed full of obscene
insults to the FSF. I think the current developers are all too nice
and too professional to do that, but I'm not so nice, and I've been
reading an awful lot of that code recently.
The one thing impressing me immensively is that Stephen is _not_ himself
of the post-war generation and attitude. And still did a remarkable job
reintroducing sanity. Without sacrificing his dignity.
I don't have the self-control for that. But I respect what he achieves
in that category, and I hate seeing his work sabotaged.
I'm not really interested in upstream.
Others are, don't make it harder for them.
I'm not a heavy emacs user, I just use it for editing
(multilingual)
text and mail. As I have said, 21.4 did everything I need apart from
Unicode.
Unicode is not exactly trivial. Lots of headstart on Emacs' site, not
least of all since MULE was stuffed into Emacs when it was far from
mature, causing the last large migration to XEmacs I am aware of.
It doesn't appear to me that Emacs is going anywhere fast,
either.
Development has picked up impressively since Richard Stallman has
stepped down as maintainer.
They are mature pieces of software.
Emacs has pretty solid right-to-left support in the development
versions, and there are things happening in the area of the Lisp machine
(parallelism, closures) that are interesting as well. And lots of stuff
across the board, and good desktop integration into Gnome desktops, and
better support for MacOSX and Windows than XEmacs has.
Not all of that is sensibly integrable into XEmacs, but some approaches
and experiences could still be helpful.
--
David Kastrup
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