"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen(a)xemacs.org> writes:
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.
I do not speak about using FFI in GNU Emacs.
D-Bus in GNU Emacs consists of dbusbind.c, dbus.el, and dbus.texi[1]. I
was thinking of writing a dbusbind.el for [S]XEmacs, reimplementing its
Lisp exported objects via ffi-dbus.el. dbus.el and dbus.texi could be
left untouched in the best case (in practice, it might be necessary to
change them as well, for example due to concurrent definitions in
dbus.el and ffi-dbus.el).
> 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.
Right. Even for MS Windows there exists a D-Bus implementation (I've
never tried it).
> 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.
See [1].
> 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.
The interface was never discussed on emacs-devel. I would be happy to
get some feedback about. There are possibilities to change/enhance the
interface; of course backwards compatibility must be taken into account,
because there exists already packages on top of it.
Best regards, Michael.
[1]: I have written dbusbind.c, dbus.el, dbus.texi.
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