Re: XEmacs at a crossroads

Raymond Toy writes: Unfortunately, it does. There are moral (and possibly legal) risks to running an unmonitored archived list (X- headers, keywords, and HTML comments are known vectors for communicating stolen credit card numbers and the like). Somebody has to monitor the postmaster address. Somebody has to pay for the domain registration. Etc, etc. In any case, it's not going to stop soon. Oh, it's definitely technically viable. People fork Emacs all the time, on GitHub etc. I think some XEmacs features would be added, or replace the GNU equivalents, very quickly. For example adding native widgets to lwlib. It wouldn't be the XEmacs we know and love today, but it wouldn't be "Emacs", either. It doesn't have to be *all* of XEmacs. The question would be social viability. We can't know until we try it. I admit the risks are great, the probability of much success not so high. That really depends on a lot of things. Some of us won't work on Emacs, but would contribute at least occasionally to XEmacs if it continues to exist, for political or personal reasons. Such contributions would be more frequent if we were closer to the bleeding edge, I am quite sure. Whether we would attract new blood or not depends on political factors, mostly. Some things that GNU won't do soon for political reasons, we can do, like proper support for the Mac and Qt in the main distribution, and close interfacing with LLVM for refactoring support. All of those have attracted attention from many people on emacs-devel, although they might not be willing to devote time to working on them if XEmacs were the only way. "Much" closer changes the equation in a qualitative way. Technically, XEmacs becomes an attractive (or at least "acceptable") platform for experimentation again. Regards, Steve _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://lists.xemacs.org/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta