Re: Use DEFAULT argument to completing-read
Martin Buchholz writes:
>>>>> "KJ" == Kyle Jones
<kyle_jones(a)wonderworks.com> writes:
KJ> Martin Buchholz writes:
>> [...]
>> With the current package model, there is _no_ _way_ for any user to
>> get a stable version of XEmacs. This is a quality control disaster.
KJ> Maybe. It's true if you believe that all that code is our
KJ> responsibility. One point of breaking out the packages is that
KJ> we no longer are responsible for the quality of all the code
KJ> that claims to run under XEmacs. The stuff distributed ouside
KJ> the core XEmacs is not part of XEmacs anymore. Your statement
KJ> is false if you believe in the new reality, as I do.
KJ> I'm serious. We need to stop thining of every piece of Lisp in
KJ> the package tree as being part of XEmacs and our responsibility.
KJ> Today's model more clearly reflects reality. We could put all
KJ> the code back into the distribution and pretend that we were
KJ> doing quality control. But that doesn't mean QC will actually
KJ> get done. Past evidence indicates that it won't, which is part
KJ> of what drove us to push the ever increasing pile of Lisp code
KJ> out of the distribution.
What an interesting idea. I don't think this statement of
responsibility is anywhere on the web site. If we claim to only try
to support the XEmacs core, then we're not really trying to provide a
functional editor at all. XEmacs without packages is not an Emacs at
all.
I disagree. XEmacs without packages, is just, well, XEmacs
without packages. The basic editing functionality is still
there. We still have buffers and windows and markers. We
still have motion commands to move across words, sentences
and paragraphs. We still have the fill commands. We still
have the kill ring. We have search and replace with regular
expressions and incremental search. We have cut and paste
with the mouse. We have menus, scrollbars, zmacs-regions,
faces, and font-lock. We have autosave and crash recovery.
And of course we have the customization and extensibility
feature necessary in a true Emacs.
To me this is a functional text editor and a pretty good one.
There are things missing that are useful certainly. Modes to edit
programming languages for instance.
Or there have to be separate projects that provide a complete
editing solution, with XEmacs at the core.
Maybe. I don't think this is strictly necessary. What we need
are committed maintainers for the various packages. I'm not
really interested in the idea of a complete editing solution.
A complete editing solution for me isn't a complete editing
solution for you. Instead of just saying to the clueless, load
everything, why not encourage them to figure out what they need
in a text editor and load the packages that provide those features?
Anyways, Kyle, I think your idea is crazy. It's the Linux
kernel
without Linux CDROM distributors. Only the lunatic fringe would use
it. (Dear readers: sorry, but the fact that you're reading this puts
you into the lunatic fringe)
Bundling code isn't any guarantee of responsibility. Linux vendors
bundled the early Emacs 20 releases, utterly broken though they
were. Do you think those vendors fixed Emacs problems? Sure we
can bundle stuff. But unless we can really support the code we
shouldn't pretend that we do by calling these bundles "XEmacs".
It might make sense to have supported and unsupported packages, (and
the supported ones are seamfully bundled with XEmacs), but we're not
currently doing this either.
Yes.