Re: XEmacs at a crossroads

[This turned into quite a lengthy post, I'm really sorry, and I hope you don't mind] On behalf of everyone who has ever been involved with SXEmacs, both past and present, I would like to thank each and every one of you guys for everything you've ever done for XEmacs. We (SXEmacs), quite literally, would not exist if it weren't for you, so thank you, thank you very very much! Stephen J Turnbull <stephen(a)xemacs.org&gt; writes: [...] We (SXEmacs) have no plans of stopping or wrapping things up, regardless of what the XEmacs team ultimately decides to do. I guess what I'm saying is that if you enjoy hacking/using XEmacs but don't really want to move to GNU, an option may be to come and talk to us. :-) Some of you may be thinking: "SXEmacs? Didn't that die ages ago?" Well, no, we're still very much alive. We just sometimes move at a different pace to the rest of the world. :-) Yes, often that pace is slower, a lot slower, but often it is also a lot faster than the world too. It all depends on how excited, or how much fun we're having. Some reasons why SXEmacs might be a good choice... 1) Copyright. Assigning away your copyright is NOT a requirement to contributing to SXEmacs. We would never ask you to do that. You can, if you want to, but I'll never ask, nor require it, of you. 2) We're not politically motivated. In fact, I do my best to keep that sort of stuff right away from the project. Yes, I realise that some things are political and you just can't keep away from it, but they're never the reason we do what we do. On the flip side, politics don't stop us from doing what we do, either. (don't read too much into this, for the life of the SXEmacs project "the politics" has never really ever come up, pretty much a total non-issue) 3) Git. SXEmacs sources, and website, are managed with git. A few may see that as a negative, but my guess is that you'd be in the minority. Besides, it could've been a hell of a lot worse... I may never have come to my senses about leaving tla behind. :-P 4) We forked from 21.4, so our roots are from a stable code base (oh, I'm sure that 21.5 is quite stable too, I'm going on how things were when we started, and that 21.4 is still advertised as the "stable branch" on www.xemacs.org). Yes, that does mean that there are 21.5 things that aren't in SXEmacs, but that just gives you the opportunity to add them if you really need them, and perhaps even make them better. It should be noted also that there is a lot in SXEmacs which isn't in 21.5 (more on that in a bit). 5) I'm not RMS. Regardless of who is currently wearing the maintainer hat over at GNU/Emacs, if RMS doesn't want something going into Emacs, it won't go in. Convincing RMS to change his mind is not the easiest thing in the world to do. Hmm, has that _ever_ actually happened, somebody got him to change his mind? Convincing me that your code should get into SXEmacs is very often fairly straight forward. Especially if you understand it well enough to explain it to a dumbo like me. :-) 6) As I hinted at in #5, I am nowhere near as smart as the amazing folk who are SXEmacs developers. That means that I never dismiss your ideas because I think I know more than you, because I rarely do. What it does mean is that often I ask a lot of questions, some of them really basic and even stupid. And you know what? That has many times lead to better design decisions and implementations. 7) We do it because we want to. Because we enjoy it. *wink* Hello! :-) The cool and sexy. Here's that list of some of the things that we have and love in SXEmacs that you guys don't have. Yes, I'm trying to whet your appetite. :-) 1) FFI. It was one of the first major new features we introduced, over a decade ago, and it has been a fantastic blessing ever since. Because of FFI a virgin SXEmacs install can use the PUI tools without having to pre-install the xemacs-base and EFS packages. Because of FFI I do pretty much all of my photo and image editing (and viewing) in SXEmacs. Got some red-eye in those holiday snaps? SXEmacs can fix that. Because of FFI I can read and manage the meta data in my music collection. Because of FFI I don't need to leave SXEmacs if I want to download something from the net, and I'm not restricted to FTP. I can even do it asynchronously. FFI means never having to say "sorry, we can't do that" :-) 2) Raw strings. Actually I think you guys may have this one in 21.5. Including it because I'm not 100% sure if you do. But goodbye backslashitis. :-) 3) Embeddable keyboard macros. We heard you like macros, bro, so we put macros in your macros. 4) Loads of crypto goodness with OpenSSL support (and gcrypt via FFI). 5) ENT (Enhanced Number Types). It's what you guys call "bignum", except we go way beyond bignums, bigfloats, and ratios. Using GMP, MPFR, MPC and a couple of others I think, we also have multi-precision floats and complex numbers with correct rounding, gaussian numbers, residue class rings, quaternions. And don't you dare ask me about these because I haven't the foggiest, I can't even pronounce half of them, let alone tell you what they are for. :-) Suffice to say that SXEmacs can do the math. 6) TTY font-lock. SXEmacs on a tty looks damn nice! Up to 256 colours if the device supports it. 7) Network server sockets #'open-network-server-stream 8) CL in DSO. We have some of the CL stuff (mainly the loop macros) in an emodule (DSO), and oh man, is it FAST!!! The elisp versions are still available. We'd love to move a lot more of the CL stuff out into DSOs. Damn, this email is going on forever. So sorry about that. And so much more to tell you. Erm, OK... bloom filters, skip lists, double linked lists, cached compiled regexps, PulseAudio, Jack, ALSA, ao, SoX, FFmpeg (broken), sndfile, Mad. And probably loads more that I can't think of right now. Oh, yeah, we spent a great deal of time and effort auditing the code with the aid of the Coverity defect scan (see scan.coverity.com). As you can see, we didn't sit around and do nothing, and there is loads of cool stuff to play with. Come and say "hey" on Freenode IRC channel "#sxemacs", you'll find me there as "SteveYoungs". Or you can contact me privately, or on our dev list, sxemacs-devel(a)sxemacs.org (it's subscriber post only to keep spam at bay) I know you have it under control currently, but if you ever need help with these, drop me a line. I'd be happy to provide hosting resources for much of these if needed. -- |---<Steve Youngs>---------------<GnuPG KeyID: A94B3003>---| | SXEmacs - The only _______ you'll ever need. | | Fill in the blank, yes, it's THAT good! | |------------------------------------&lt;steve(a)sxemacs.org&gt;---| _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://lists.xemacs.org/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta