Why I attempted to port dired/VC from emacs
Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
Could you post to xemacs-beta what your reasons are for porting
Dired
and VC? On the one, Ville has already ported VC, although I think
it's still in prerelease. On the other, this is the first that I've
heard that our Dired is falling behind, although I believe it as Mike
hasn't done much with Dired in a couple of years. CC Mike
<mike(a)xemacs.org> and Ville <scop(a)xemacs.org>. Be as brief as you
like, but it would be nice to let those guys know there's serious
demand for certain features out there. Don't expect quick action from
Mike though; he's doing the "new daddy" thing. :-)
Steve
Hi Guys:
I have been looking for a replacement of psvn for a while since it's not
an xemacs package. I was pretty happy to see vc with svn support come
out. However, I have had trouble getting vc-dired, or whatever it is
called, working (you probably gathered this from my frenzy of bug
reports, especially issue 491). I tried debugging this myself and I did
make some progress before I hit the wall.
So, I installed the latest emacs to see what was
going wrong. I got the impression that the differences have more to
do with dired than vc. However, it is very hard to tell since the
sources have diverged so much. I wanted a version of dired and vc
as close to emacs as possible to see if I could see where the subtle
differences are (and fix them). The first part I have accomplished.
I've got vc-dired working from emacs sources and I think there
is only 1 change to the sources. The second part is somewhat of a
work in progress. I'm still fixing subtle bugs, but vc-dired does
work with svn. One problem is that I don't have much experience with
vc to realize what's still missing.
This is a bit of a digression, but I had to do alot of hacking. There
was only 1 change in the sources for vc and dired themselves, but I
needed to grab code chunks from other emacs sources. One thing that has
occurred to me. If we ported all of the emacs lisp sources, much of
this would be unnecessary. And then,
it would just be back to dired and vc which would be largely unchanged.
For example, there are code-chunks needed from bindings.el, byte-run.el,
dnd.el, indent.el, log-edit.el, subr.el, simple.el, view.el and all of
desktop.el and diff.el (although, this last file might be unnecessary or
even foolhardy). There
is a file of changes on issue 491, but it is out-of-date now.
Perhaps this is already part of your plans. I know the GPLv3 thing has been
discussed and appears to be near resolution. If there was a "committee"
that
would split up these emacs sources and do some porting, I would be
willing to
do my part. However, I'm no expert on mercurial and patches give me
headaches.
One last thought. This may help other ports like comint as well. The
recent
port of comint from emacs to xemacs wreaked havoc here. Maybe it is because
the gap is getting to wide to breach. After the port was reverted,
everything
is back to normal. There are more hackers on the emacs side, so it would
be to our benefit if we were more source-code compliant. I'm no
software expert
so perhaps these are ravings. It certainly would be helpful for dired
and vc.
--
Rodney Sparapani Center for Patient Care & Outcomes Research (PCOR)
Sr. Biostatistician http://www.mcw.edu/pcor
4 wheels good, 2 wheels better! Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW)
WWLD?: What Would Lombardi Do? Milwaukee, WI, USA
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