Re: xsymbol included in the SUMO tar ball

Uwe> I have to discuss this with Christoph of course; in principle Uwe> yes, however I consider x-symbol as a rather sophisticate Uwe> package quite beyond my lisp knowledge and I am not sure that Uwe> I am qualified for this. I think you're misunderstanding the role of the third party maintainer here. XEmacs would prefer that there be _no_ changes from the upstream distribution, that everything be done in the Makefile. So in theory it should just be a matter of cd $package cvs update -A cvs -d $UPSTREAM_CVSROOT update -j upstream_release # edit Makefile to update AUTHOR_VERSION and maybe REQUIRES # maybe resolve some conflicts in ChangeLogs and stuff. cvs commit In practice it's often necessary to maintain an upstream tree and an XEmacs tree, but otherwise not much different. So what do we need you for? To decide when this needs to be done! Some packages change daily, and weekly XEmacs CVS updates are not out of the question. Others haven't had an "official release" in years, but the people who follow the package have been using the "beta" version with no problems almost that long, and it is now significantly divergent (this is the AUC-TeX situation AFAIK). You _care_ about that package, you already know improvements are available, you know what problems people have had. _You_ have a lot of expertise. To acquire that would cost Ville or Rendhalver or me a _lot_ of time! If there are problems with the code itself, either the upstream maintainer or we can usually help with that. It's the stuff that is _so obvious_ to you ("the need") that we don't have time to deal with. It's also a big help if you do the routine merging (ie, typically ChangeLogs have conflicts because the XEmacs version will have XEmacs package release heralds in it, but of course upstream doesn't). Please consider it; it's not as hard as you think, I believe, and the problems you are worried about are exactly the ones that we are best at helping with. -- Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences 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.