a crisis is a chance

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Andreas Roehler writes:

 > in relation with GNU [XEmacs's health] looks serious to an extent,
 > even the most gifted single person can't make it.

Heh.  Once we put GPLv3 behind us, you will be amazed, I promise you.

 > Why not leave XEmacs and develop useful stuff based on
 > present GNU instead?

Speaking for myself:

Because GNU Emacs is even more boring than XEmacs is confused.
There's really good work being done in some of the larger Lisp
projects (AUCTeX, CEDET, JDEE), and they do work better with GNU, but
they generally compete with GUI IDEs and have a rough time competing
for mindshare.  And if you look at the older ones (AUCTeX, Gnus) you
see their leadership being quite conservative (in the sense of
focusing on solid, well-understood improvements) too.

There may be some exciting stuff happening in SXEmacs, but I'm too
"Old Guard" and busy to take a close look.  Ben and I will work out
our differences, and my bet is that he'll stick around for a while and
that XEmacs will be the exciting Emacs to work on as long as he does.
It may not be as good at supporting the existing apps as GNU, but fun
things will happen.

And I agree with Didier.  XEmacs's is the code base I know, and I like
it better than Emacs's.