Re: That "vision" thang...

Executive summary: What you and Mats and everybody who thinks a cross- platform toolkit is an attractive plan need to do to get me on board with that idea is this. Start evaluating the existing toolkits. Don't worry about the technical lowlevel stuff for integration. Which ones look attractive on Linux/*BSD (KDE & GNOME desktops), Solaris, Windows, and Mac? Which ones provide functions to pop up printer and font-selection dialogs on all supported platforms? Etc. You know what you think is needed for desktop integration, so you can at least weed out the ones that don't even satisfy your basic requirements. Give me that much, and I'll put my experience and knowledge behind your idea, instead of resisting it. But I need some direction, because I don't think it's worth it, and as it stands I'm not willing to put out the effort to specify requirements, investigate features, and evaluate technical feasibility. Give me a leading candidate (on the grounds of attractiveness and providing the relevant high-level features. Then I can concentrate on that last task. If it at least comes close on technical grounds, we can go on to second choices in hopes that they're technically sufficient. I don't speak for the Board on this; that's a personal commitment. But if you can satisfy me, you'll have a pretty strong advocate on the Board. Some additional comments: Marcus Harnisch writes: If this were proprietary software, "what we need" would be backed up with money, and money would reasonably quickly elicit what we need from the market. It's not, so "what we need" and "what we will get" have very little relationship to each other. What I've seen "out there" leads me to believe there's not much we can outsource that we haven't already done. True, but so what? We're not talking about the conversion rate for all users here. We're talking about the conversion rate for users attracted to XEmacs by desktop and platform integration. I don't know of any such developers (and that's true for Emacs too), though there may be some. 0% times 1,000,000 users is still 0 developers. Yes. Exactly! Multiple toolkits. Each platform's toolkit. Just like <effect type="drum roll">XEmacs does</effect>, and you advocate we should stop doing. :-( Look, Marcus, I've read all of the redisplay code. I've dug deep into the Xt event loop. I've worked on Xft. I've worked on Mule. I was there when Jareth Hein spent 3 months replacing all our image code with libmagick, and then the next three weeks ripping it all back out and replacing it with (improved) lowlevel marshalling code on a library-by-library basis because libmagick sucked as a way to handle images for XEmacs display. I understand the theory, but I've also participated in the practice. I accept the theory as correct, as far as it goes. I acknowledge that my experience is hardly complete. But since it's my time that's being demanded here, I'm going to insist that my negative experience with "cross-platform" toolkits trumps that attractive theory. "It's a good idea" is not enough to get me to move; we need a concrete proposal. And I don't have one to offer myself. Olivier already answered that. In the opinion of the people who have done this kind of work in the past, and presumably will be called on to implement this proposal, dependence on a cross-platform toolkit will dramatically decrease the quality of the features we can provide. _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://calypso.tux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta