Re: Release planning

Fruhwirth> I consider it a smart move, if sjt-xft was merged into Fruhwirth> MAIN and released explicitly tagged as Fruhwirth> "experimental". Remember the hype X.Org experienced Fruhwirth> when they announced XComposite in 6.8.2? No, I don't---I could care less, I use X11 to display XEmacs, and not much more. And that's an important point. Most of the people currently using XEmacs want well-integrated features, not hype. They have work to do. Yes, they'll know about anti-aliased fonts, which makes work less painful and more productive, and maybe even Xft, but they will not be expecting to configure them with .Xresources! Fruhwirth> So don't be overmodest, the sjt-xft branch is really Fruhwirth> worth to be merged and tagged experimental. You're right about performance, IMO. Release XEmacs with Xft and the hackers (and AMD) will fix the performance problems. However, I would die of shame to release an XEmacs that doesn't have a reasonable interface for customizing faces (and Customize---besides being totally ignorant of Xft at the moment---is not reasonable, we must do better than that). And I think most of the UI hackers we really want would look at sjt-xft and say "Oh God" and go away. The Xft branch as currently constituted is a proof of concept, not ready for prime time, and there are 5 years of history (starting with the run-up to release of 21.4) that says nobody is willing to do the work that is needed. I'm talking about lisp/cus*.el, src/faces.*, and stuff like that. Until that stuff is under control (which IMO means a complete refactoring, not simply ever more kludges to fix design breakage), the only people who are going to be able to use such an XEmacs are already using it. That is *my* number one priority for a release. Number two is Unicode as the internal encoding (as an option). Given those two, Xft is as easy as "Well, hel-lo-o-o World!" But without them, it's overengineering. -- School of Systems and Information Engineering http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Ask not how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software.