rrt> I can't imagine that the changes would be very great
rrt> (although I'm sure that it's a bit more than
rrt> s/Emacs/XEmacs/!).
Try it. It's harder than you think to do it well. It's not clear to
me that doing it halfway, and then fixing what's broke, is a good
strategy, either. There's likely to be a fair amount of breakage.
The FSF regularly makes API and semantic changes. We don't find out
about them until after release because it is apparently FSF policy to
deny XEmacs developers access to the FSF developer lists for the
purpose of synchronization. rms considers it "industrial espionage."
He really is stupid sometimes, not to mention inconsistent; is this
open source or what?
This means that although there may be few changes from FSF reality
to
XEmacs reality, _every single proposed doc synch_ must be vetted to
ensure that it doesn't introduce an error.
I think I have a plausible approach to this, and that is to focus on
bits of documentation I have found lacking. These have mostly been at
the user-interface level and in fairly core bits of the system: the
two in question have been dired and the way that major mode is chosen
(I wanted to find out how to set a major mode based on the #! line in
a script; the relevant bit was at the bottom of a page in the FSF docs
and simply missing from XEmacs, but it worked fine).
This way, I wouldn't be trying to do too much, but would still be
working on problems which have bitten me, and hence probably bite
others. Also, I suspect it's easier to get into this than coding (at
least for me; I'm a doc-head as much as a code-head!), so is an easier
way for me to contribute to the project.
Even the documentation I'm working on personally is _new_
documentation. Arguably we should get what we have up-to-date first,
but I happen to disagree.
Of course it depends on the docs in question. But when I see core docs
seven years out of date it makes me think that something's gone wrong
somewhere. I know, I can always (and especially with (X)Emacs) read
the code, even in quite high-level ways like M-x apropos, but this is
too hit and miss, and shouldn't be necessary, even if it is rather
cool, and often quicker for someone familiar with XEmacs (as I learn
Emacs, I find it easier to guess what to apropos for).
up-to-date than the Info documentation. Eg, C-h m in Dired mode
presumably _does_ document the "m" command.
Well, "h" does (which is where C-h m directs you).
the FSF docs you're synching to. However, at this point we
are
trying to support both texinfo.el and makeinfo 1.68 (IIRC), so some
of the more modern "logical" directives (eg, the @env{} form)
should be avoided.
Urgh. I am a fan of logical mark-up. Never mind!
Thanks for the guidance above; I hope that's copied from or goes into
one of your process documents! Probably the latter; once or twice I've
found myself writing advice like that and then realised I really ought
to be writing a process doc...and actually did.
At the moment most of my XEmacs bandwith is going into getting my
environment fully functional, as I've just switched from Pine to
Wanderlust, and slrn to Gnus. Funnily, despite trying it several times
because I knew I ought to, I never got my head around Emacs, and was
using NEdit until forced to use FSF Emacs under Windows, because it
was the only decent editor available. This was while working at
Microsoft. Okay, Microsoft Research. What a weird place finally to see
the light of the OTE...