Re: [Announce] SXEmacs 22.1.10 "Excalibur" has been released!
Nelson Ferreira writes:
Indeed. GNU Emacs currently does not (at the best of my knowledge)
support FFI.
And won't. RMS is adamant on that point. It came up in an ongoing
thread, and he once again insisted that (with current technology)
dynamic loading of binaries into Emacs is not acceptable.
This allows us not to introduce an additional link (and deploy)
time dependency with D-Bus, which at this time is not yet widely
deployed outside of Linux.
I think anything that uses GTK now uses (or at least is capable of
using) D-Bus. I know that it's a dependency for a number of packages
I use via MacPorts for example, and I would suppose on other *BSD
distributions.
Well since SXEmacs is GPL3 as GNU Emacs, and with past history in
mind, I believe convincing GNU maintainers to keep it in sync is,
at best, a difficult endeavor.
I agree. GNU Emacs does not sync to other Emacsen. RMS explains this
as necessary so that Emacs can have Emacs-optimal interfaces. The
only way to get this done is to commit to doing it oneself, under
the supervision of RMS, Stefan, and Yidong. I won't ever try to do
that again, myself, but YMMV.
However, in case it is deemed the interface to offer, as is done
with other Lisp code, the code is periodically synced.
I don't have time to look at the Emacs dbus API right now. I suspect
I won't like it very much when I do see it (that "vast technical gulf"
:-), but compatibility is better than not. On the other hand, Steve Y
contributed a (now old) port of SXEmacs's FFI to XEmacs which I plan
to update and add to 21.5 shortly. So if you like, or at least find
acceptable, the Emacs dbus API, I would appreciate it (on behalf of
XEmacs) if you would sync to it.
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