Re: Fwd: sign off on XEmacs 21.5
"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen(a)xemacs.org> writes:
David Kastrup writes:
> The only technical difference to an XEmacs package is that it is
> not distributed as one. The form is identical.
Um, wrong. The *important* technical difference is that it is not
built as an XEmacs package in the context of other XEmacs packages.
That's the way package systems work. You know that, David.
That is the way you _build_ your packages, not the way you distribute
them. For the distribution, it does not matter how the package was
built.
As for the rest of your post, we've been over that many times
before.
My position is that you're wrong about the value of our policies, and
that you have no support from XEmacs insiders that I can see for your
very vague proposals about the policies themselves, and none for the
proposal that we distribute a third-party tarball.
I have no support from XEmacs insiders, period. Yes, that is one of the
problems. It is comforting that nowadays that is pretty the much the
situation for close to everybody.
The door is open; while Uwe is the official maintainer of the XEmacs
package, I doubt you'd get any opposition if you asked for the
position, committing to working according to the rules until you
succeed in getting them changed. As an active insider (even
restricted to work on AUCTeX), you probably would succeed, too, at
least if you put your weight behind one of the several proposals
floated over the years for changing or augmenting the package system.
So to be allowed to argue for maintaining AUCTeX as an external package,
I should make and maintain it as an XEmacs-internal package.
It is comforting to see that my deficient sense of humor is aptly being
compensated.
I understand that you consider that an extremely unattractive offer,
but that's the standard one for a volunteer open source project, as
you well know.
Funny that. What I know as the standard for volunteer open source
projects is "show me the code". Who does the work gets to choose how it
is done. We have been showing a working XEmacs package for years.
But there is no point in continuing that exercise. It takes
considerable effort and only benefits those XEmacs users who are willing
to supplant the stock XEmacs AUCTeX offering. Since the stock XEmacs
AUCTeX is in Sumo, system integrators usually have little choice to
include an up-to-date AUCTeX unless they are willing to distribute a
non-standard Sumo. So just users manually juggling with the package
manager get a useful AUCTeX version. And since those tend to be serious
users of AUCTeX, they are better off switching to Emacs, anyway:
fundamental XEmacs core facilities needed by AUCTeX are deficient. Font
locking, indentation, invisibility/folding, image support, utf-8 support
and so on. Error reports are mostly ignored or answered with "Fix it
yourself if you care. Nobody else does." The hurdles for getting a
package are just the tip of the iceberg.
At the very least for serious LaTeX users, the only sensible
recommendation nowadays is "steer clear of XEmacs".
And that's just stupid. I'll admit that I don't like XEmacs (and
working on it), but I like stupid even less. It is not funny. Not even
to the thing that could, in lieu of anything else claiming the title,
could be called my sense of humor.
--
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum
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