Re: Where to put recenter-top-bottom?
Mats Lidell writes:
Well, I was trying to figure out what would be considered the right
thing. xemacs-devel package or in core? Just flip a coin?
If this depends on XEmacs core functionality not in 21.4, put it in
core, next to `recenter' -- that's easiest. But if you're bringing
all needed functionality over from GNU anyway, and it's usable in
XEmacs 21.4, then it should probably go in xemacs-base (not
xemacs-devel). I would suggest a file named ui-21-5.el. Give it a
comment saying it was introduced in the *next* beta, ie, 21.5.33.
This brings me to another related problem which is the
documentation. To be a good patch the docs should be updated
accordingly. Now this can be done in different ways:
- Just ignore the docs for now, possibly enter an issue in the
tracker for it.
Please, no. :-)
- Do a half hearted job and just make the necessary minimal changes
so that the info pages are not wrong but maybe not that good
either
- Try to do it right, which might involve, quite large rewrites even
for a small change.
I don't see why this need be so, at least not in this case. The basic
functionality doesn't change. So document the command and the change
in keybinding, and you're done, no? The TUTORIAL doesn't even need to
change, as the -top-bottom functionality can be considered "advanced"
(at least more so than just recenter).
If we put UI improvements being tested into packages, I think the
right thing to do is to update the XEmacs User Guide (xemacs.info) and
the English TUTORIAL (and Swedish, if you like :-) to point to the
documentation for the ui-x.y.z libraries, saying that if you have a
beta version of XEmacs, the most recent such library contains UI
improvements being tested.
One hard fact that could suggest adding it in core is that the
functions brought in from recent GNU Emacs will be GPLv3 or
later.
This isn't a problem, as far as I can see. XEmacs itself is now
GPLv3. (If RMS wants to complain that XEmacs 21.4 is the stable
version, we just do an immediate public release of 21.6 with whatever
code we have and he has to shut up -- there are plenty of old versions
of Emacs under v2 kicking around, even on gnu.org sites.) The fact
that XEmacs 21.4 is GPLv2 doesn't prevent users from using GPLv3 code
with it, or us from supporting 21.4 while distributing GPLv3 code in a
different distribution. We can even add recenter-top-bottom to 21.4
(in private copies). The GPL only prevents us (and anyone else) from
*redistributing that version*.
The (potential) problem we used to have was that people could say that
since we didn't distribute a GPLv3 XEmacs at all, the separation of
packages from XEmacs was just a device to get GPLv3 code into the
"real" XEmacs = GPLv2 core + GPLv3 packages. That's a no-no.
Steve
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