Re: Perl embedding: trial balloon
Geoffrey Furnish writes:
In any event, please cut John--and by obvious extension, the
rest of the world--some slack for being interested in more
things than just Elisp, and tone down all this rhetoric. It
makes it hard to concentrate on the work. I for one, have a
lot to learn about XEmacs, both the lisp side, and the C
internals. And I would like to believe I have the freedom to
ask questions on the beta channel. Although I have actually
gotten many helpful snipets over the last few weeks, including
a little constructive advice at the top of this thread, I have
to say that seeing all this attitude projected at John has
definitely cast a cold frost across the XEmacs landscape.
If you don't like the way the project is being run you always
have the option of forking your own branch. That is how XEmacs
came into being and there's certainly no law that says XEmacs
can't have disgruntled spinoffs of its own. The reason this kind
of forking has not happened over past disputes is the same reason
why the current maintainers are nervous about merging Perl and
Emacs.
In a word: maintenance. Merging Perl and Emacs is only the
beginning, there are years of work after that, just as there
are years of work ahead once you fork a branch of Emacs. We
simply cannot accept work that isn't in a form that we can
realistically maintain. We have no paid help, not a single
person.
So we have to be discerning, we have to say "no" sometimes, we
have to distinguish hard work from good design. It is not good
design to take two systems evolving at different speeds, and in
different directions, and written for fundamentally different
purposes and mash them together. Particularly two systems as
complex as Perl and Emacs.