[VETO] old ws -- packages, define-behavior

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

>>>>> "ms" == Michael Sperber <sperber at informatik.uni-tuebingen.de> writes:

    ms> An example: I was trying to track down and quash that
    ms> syntax-table bug I posted about.  I spent about half a day on
    ms> this, and just got lost in a twisty maze of changes just
    ms> trying to understand what's going on.

I don't get it.  I just went through that ChangeLog, and if Ben didn't
leave out or incorrectly describe some of the content of the patch,
all the changes to syntax.[ch] since the fork from 21.4 are
straightforward in concept, except for the confusion of three largish
tasks (make cache per-buffer, reduce cache invalidation, and improve
reentrancy resistance) in the Godzilla Megapatch of 2002-05-05.  Even
so, the purposes of the changes to syntax.c in that patch are clearly
described and grouped in a way that's easy to find.  The history seems
clear enough to me, and I would ignore the patches and go straight to
the code.

I'll admit I can see some formal changes that would make it a bit
quicker and more pleasant to figure out the above.

Ben, please take a look at that ChangeLog; the date identifies it
clearly.  It is not clear to me that the syntax table, extent change
signalling, and case table changes could have been easily separated
into separate patches, simply by diffing those files separately, but
that seems feasible, and would be desirable.  ChangeLog to be handled
by duplicating any of the renaming/API rationalization that applied to
them.

Separating out the "three tasks" in the syntax code would be desirable
if cheap enough, but I suppose that would have been really painful?

Mike, is that the kind of process that would help address your issues?

Mike, you could ask any or all of Matt Tucker, Andy, Ben, and me about
syntax.c.  I'm pretty sure Jerry has poked around in the syntax.el
code.  If you want to know how the GNU code works, Stefan Monnier is
helpful.

Yes, ISTR you posted something about this on xemacs-beta.  I did my
penance on syntax.c, it was not pleasant, and I found my excuses for
not getting into it (in particular, I figured you and Jerry know what
you're doing better than me).  I'm sure you'd get a useful response
(at least to eliminate a developer as a potential source of help) to
personal mail or (maybe) a public cry for help, but only somebody who
already knows the answer but hasn't heard the question yet will
respond to a vague "does anybody know about" query on -beta.  At
least, that's my excuse.  :-/

    ms> For you, it's all about changing the code.  For me, it's about
    ms> understanding what's going on.

Hey, if Ben didn't care about understanding, and even more, sharing
that, he wouldn't be the primary author of the Internals manual.

Why don't you ask him to update it with respect to the syntax table
implementation?  He might even just fix the bug while he was at it.
;-)


-- 
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences     http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
               Ask not how you can "do" free software business;
              ask what your business can "do for" free software.