Re: tab breakage yet again (XEmacs 21.2.29 is released.)

KK> "John A. Turner" <turner(a)blueskystudios.com&gt; writes: KK> Well, I meant it strongly enough to indicate that I'm annoyed that an KK> odd definition of "progress" is present, and I think such annoyance is KK> justified. I agree. I wear Karl's hat on the egcs project, and I'm not happy at the large numbers of bugs I've found pre-testing egcs snapshots, so I know where his head is at. I wish they would use successful compilation of XEmacs with C and C++, with optimization and debug, as a criterion in their test suite. The control of quality on free software projects is a hard problem, given that hacking on new features is generally cooler. We'll see if the commercialization of free software will make a difference. And personally, I'm trying to make a difference. KK> I certainly expect new features to have bugs to be shaken out. But KK> tabs began appearing sometime in the early 21.2.teens, here we are at KK> .29, and today tabs can't even correlate with buffers present. KK> No, I don't expect code that's merely "right". This is a beta list, KK> after all, and I know that. I'm on it because I like/want/need some KK> of the features present in 21.2 and I'm pretty good at stressing KK> certain odd corners of XEmacs to uncover bugs; when things get bad KK> enough, as they unavoidably do, I just sit tight on N-1 and wait for KK> the N+1 version in hope of something less unstable. On the other KK> hand, a concept of "improvement" needs to be considered, not merely KK> "updated" and "different": I ask, in an honest and earnest tone, KK> whether the .29 state of tabs was tested at all, by anybody, for it to KK> be in this condition. XEmacs 21.2 is pretty stable for me if you disable gutter tabs (as I do): ;;; No 21.2 tabs, please (defmacro safe-set-specifier (specifier value) `(when (and (boundp ',specifier) (specifierp ,specifier)) (set-specifier ,specifier ,value))) (safe-set-specifier default-gutter-visible-p nil) Karl, I suggest you use this as well. KK> Andy, I don't mean to offend you personally, but one does have to KK> wonder what experimentation with a fix happens before it lands in CVS. KK> Is it any surprise that such wonderment exists, when tabs literally KK> don't work at all? KK> Regrets to any others I might have also offended. We should be looking towards a release of XEmacs 21.2 soonish. The things holding us up: - We'd like to turn on the portable dumper by default, but it's not actually quite done yet. - We'd like to solve any redisplay/gutter code stability problems. - I'd like to do something about the packaging of the packages. Not sure quite what, though. I'm willing to help to do whatever it takes to make these things happen, with the understanding that Olivier, Andy, Steve, and Michael all have more expertise on the features they implemented than I do. Andy, I'd like to see these things for the gutter feature: - documentation - add to the automated test suite (might be hard - currently there are no automated gui tests). - turn off by default for non-beta releases. Or, we could hold a vote in xemacs-beta or even comp.emacs.xemacs as to whether this feature is one they are using. Unfortunately, getting an unbiased result of such a vote is tough. Martin