Re: XEmacs at a crossroads

Stephen> Raymond Toy writes: Stephen> Richard certainly recognizes that sense of "compete", and so do many Stephen> GNU Emacs contributors. Richard has always discouraged GNU Emacs Stephen> developers from even looking at XEmacs code (for several reasons, the Stephen> most important of which is copyright paranoia), and actively solicited Stephen> our contributors and users to work on Emacs because "GNU's work is so Stephen> important" (he claims to believe that that would have no impact on Stephen> contributions to XEmacs, I'm an economist and know better). That seems self-evident, even if you're not an economist. Stephen> 1. Close up shop and release the resources to other projects. Stephen> Of course XEmacs source code would continue to exist. AFAIK Bitbucket Stephen> has no policy to shut down inactive repos. But the project could shut Stephen> down. That is, no infrastructure support for users and would-be Stephen> developers. No MLs, no central archives, no binary packages. This It would be unfortunate if the mailing list stopped. That doesn't mean, however, that someone has to continue to handle spam and other maintenance. Stephen> And thre are proactive tasks that need to be done. The Tux Stephen> infrastructure is creaking (and so is their administration; the most Stephen> active admin there claims he isn't an admin and is more interested in Stephen> preventing spam than in delivering mail). We have an alternative host Stephen> in mind, but I need to free up some "round tuits" and implement it Stephen> (and that task gets more daunting all the time with each newsclip on Stephen> yet another exploit of some major site). Stephen> Yeah, we know that. But it's the only way we've thought of so far to Stephen> get back to feature parity. Does anyone see this as a viable alternative? XEmacs would be Emacs until someone puts in all of the XEmacs bits back in. That seems like a fair bit of work. And then what? Won't XEmacs be in the same boat as it is now, except that it's much closer to Emacs than it is now? -- Ray _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://lists.xemacs.org/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta