Re: XEmacs at a crossroads
Stephen J. Turnbull writes:
To all XEmacs supporters and users:
...
After some discussion on the XEmacs-Review mailing list, we decided to
open up a public discussion of the future of the XEmacs Project.
...
4. Maintain infrastructure as a "caretaker" project, for the
benefit of continuing users, and in case somebody wants to
pick up the ball.
I'm a small cog in this enterprise, but (like many others, I suspect) I
have a particular investment that I care about, namely keeping XEmacs
running under Windows, and, latterly, that has meant taking on getting
it running on 64-bit _as_ 64-bit, both via Cygwin and natively.
I suspect I'm a poster-child for precisely some of the problems you
identified in your post: I've largely succeeded (Cygwin and Mingw 32-
and 64-bit builds work now), and I've had a lot of help from people with
much deeper knowledge of XEmacs internals without which I wouldn't have
gotten this far. So far so good, but we haven't released a 64-bit
buildable set of sources, much less binaries, because I have _not_ been
able to get a fully native build (i.e. one using some
currently-available free version of Visual Studio) to work (32- or 64-
bit).
The problems I've encountered are in an area (failure to re-map the
dumped image) that are way beyond my ability to understand, but the
expert eyes that are needed to locate the problem are, I suspect, no
longer available. Note this is _not_ a complaint about that, just a
statement of fact.
Net-net: I'm willing to support option 4 by taking on responsibility for
maintaining Windows builds as best I can, but the bar will have to be
lower than in the past. That is, support for nmake/Visual-Studio builds
will be withdrawn (it hasn't worked for years in any case without a
10-year-old version of VS, which is no longer available), so the only
way that a native build can made will be with 32- or 64-bit mingw32-gcc.
ht
--
Henry S. Thompson, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh
10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB, SCOTLAND -- (44) 131 650-4440
Fax: (44) 131 650-4587, e-mail: ht(a)inf.ed.ac.uk
URL: http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/
[mail from me _always_ has a .sig like this -- mail without it is forged spam]
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