Re: yet another XEmacs fork;-)
Ar an cúigiú lá de mí na Samhain, scríobh Julian Bradfield:
I think it's about time I came clean about why I've been
finding bugs
and asking strange questions recently...
For a very long time, I've been almost but not quite perfectly happy with
XEmacs 21.4. There are two major bummers: the catastrophic slowness in
sequential access to large buffers; and the lack of true Unicode
support. (mule-ucs is pretty good, but requires some set-up, and loses
data if you get your set-up wrong, or find a file with a codepoint you
didn't know you had to deal with. mule-ucs is also really disgusting
to maintain. ccl, ack, splt.) The slowness I could now fix, by
backporting the 21.5.21 improvements to the bufbyte-charpos cache;
this message is about the other issue. (It might be worth saying that
I want extensive multi-lingual support because I write about languages
and non-English things, not because I actually do any non-trivial
document processing in anything other than English. So I have no need
to process a 100MB Japanese document efficiently, say.)
XEmacs 21.5 ought to be an improvement, given the massive changes made
in it, and the many MULE improvements, but for me it isn't enough.
The unicode support is bolted on in a rather horrible fashion, albeit
much more robustly than via mule-ucs;
[...]
Now, this could be a purely private project; or it could be a way
that
either SXEmacs or XEmacs might want to consider. I'd be interested in
the views of the XEmacs developers on this idea - especially the
reasons why it's a really bad idea and hasn't already been done!
What you’ve done and what you propose appears, to me, to be less
maintainable and less coherent (more horrible) than the 21.5 approach. As
you describe where you’re coming from, to me it seems to be a better idea to
fix VM on 21.5 and to improve 21.5’s speed where it matters to you.
Boyer-Moore is definitely worth the effort these days, the GNUs people
reported a bug to GNU with big folders once they implemented the case
equivalence i = I = İ = ı. I can’t find the message right now, sorry.
On the issue of deunification and non-UCS support; people basically won’t
understand it, you will get very few people comfortable enough with the
basics to write good code. (There are few enough coders that really
understand Unicode, the number that understand Mule or any other non-Unicode
approach is a tiny fraction of that, from my estimation.) Unicode is the
only game in town, I wish we had dropped the Mule internal encoding long
ago.
If it works out for you, best of luck with it. I don’t think there’s much
place for the work as you describe it in XEmacs, though, not least because
21.4 is stable. But I’m not active right now, and I won’t veto anything
until I am active, which could well take years.
I guess it'll be a couple more weeks before I'm really ready
to let
other people have the code - if you'd like to see it at that point,
drop me a line.
Julian.
P.S. Note new email address. My department has been forced to give up
its own mail service, and the Edinburgh University mail service is slow,
unreliable, and interferes with mail.
--
¿Dónde estará ahora mi sobrino Yoghurtu Nghé, que tuvo que huir
precipitadamente de la aldea por culpa de la escasez de rinocerontes?
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