Re: [VETO] Re: XEmacs-21.4.5 info-look; sync with Emacs-21.1

SY> Isn't that a bit of a defeatist attitude? It's not like it SY> would be impossible to do and in most cases not hard either, SY> just time consuming. Exactly. And just whose time do you think it's going to consume? Not yours. That is negligible compared to the waste in time for the 3rd party developers who want to support both GNU Emacsen. SY> You mean sort of like the obsolete function thingy? Sounds SY> good as part of the solution/fight. :-) It is not a "fight," for Heaven's sake. The 3rd party developers are not our enemy, GNU Emacs is not our enemy. SY> What would 'extents.el' do for the FSF folk? Some of them, it would piss off, big time. That's why the smiley. What it would do for the 3rd party developers is give them access to what we consider the superior interface and implementation. If it's really so much better, then at least some of them (think "Kyle Jones") would possibly switch to using $package-extent-* calls instead of $package-overlay-* calls. That's simply not in the cards now when prototyping an XEmacs port is so easy to do with "(require 'overlay)", but there is no equivalent for using extents in the mainline version of GNU Emacs. Then to placate our API bigots, the 3rd party guys reproduce portions of overlay.el in their package. What are we thinking!??! Consider the following conversation between a 3rd Party Guy and an XEmacs Consultant: 3PG: I really need to snarfle the mumblefritz text. It's marked out with an extent for font-lock, but snarfling is hard. XEC: Actually, in XEmacs you can just do (extent-snarfle extent (mumblefritz)). 3PG: Cool! But what do I do in GNU Emacs? ... well, I'll get to that later, I need to get the prototype done quick. [3 weeks later] 3PG: Hey these extents are really cool. I didn't know you could .... Now consider this conversation: 3PG: I really need to snarfle the mumblefritz text. It's marked out with an overlay for font-lock, but snarfling is hard. XEC: Actually, in XEmacs you can just do (extent-snarfle extent (mumblefritz)). But you have to convert to extent calls first, overlay.el doesn't handle that. 3PG: Uh, I'll get back to you on that.... [3 weeks later] 3PG: Hey um this dual repository stuff is taking up too much of my time. So sorry, but I can't maintain the XEmacs package version any more. BTW, mumblefritz snarfling is still buggy on XEmacs.... It won't work every time, but having a 3PG-friendly attitude will do a lot for the popularity of XEmacs, especially where we still have a major technical advantage (ie, Windows, where Emacs 21.1 still doesn't display images). -- Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Don't ask how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software.