Re: XEmacs at a crossroads

Raymond Toy writes: It's not primarily a race for the gold medal, no. However, there's another sense of "compete", which is competition for resources. Mostly, that time spent using and working on anything else is time not spent on XEmacs. While I've never believed that number of contributors is a deterministic increasing function of number of users, it certainly doesn't hurt to have a lot of enthusiastic users. Richard certainly recognizes that sense of "compete", and so do many GNU Emacs contributors. Richard has always discouraged GNU Emacs developers from even looking at XEmacs code (for several reasons, the most important of which is copyright paranoia), and actively solicited our contributors and users to work on Emacs because "GNU's work is so important" (he claims to believe that that would have no impact on contributions to XEmacs, I'm an economist and know better). On the other hand, part of what kept me going for years was the belief that XEmacs was a better editor and closer to the users' needs than Emacs, and that the XEmacs Project could be more responsive to industrial users than Emacs was. You could say that that's just a project with different goals, not a competition, but I always kept an eye on relative position to Emacs when allocating time. :-) I can't speak for the other developers in general, but Steve Baur and Ben Wing definitely were motivated to be "better than Emacs" at least in part. Of course XEmacs source code would continue to exist. AFAIK Bitbucket has no policy to shut down inactive repos. But the project could shut down. That is, no infrastructure support for users and would-be developers. No MLs, no central archives, no binary packages. This mailing list no longer costs me hours each week, but I'd guess I spend an hour to two hours a month on moderation and maintenance. I imagine the same is true for Norbert maintaining packages and Vin for 21.4. And thre are proactive tasks that need to be done. The Tux infrastructure is creaking (and so is their administration; the most active admin there claims he isn't an admin and is more interested in preventing spam than in delivering mail). We have an alternative host in mind, but I need to free up some "round tuits" and implement it (and that task gets more daunting all the time with each newsclip on yet another exploit of some major site). Yeah, we know that. But it's the only way we've thought of so far to get back to feature parity. Steve _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://lists.xemacs.org/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta