Re: new version of allout.el - whole file and ChangeLog entry

Ken> attached is a new version of allout.el Great! Thank you for your submission; the format is perfect and the detailed explanation very helpful. Ken> and a ChangeLog for a substantial new revision of allout, Ken> emacs' alternative (and much more extensive) outliner. I notice that there is no Texinfo documentation in your submission. If you have Texinfo documentation in the GNU Emacs distribution *we cannot legally use it* without *specific* permission from the FSF because the documentation license we inherited from Emacs 19 is incompatible with the GFDL, and rms denied our request for a blanket dual licensing. Ken> i think it's ready to replace the distributed version. By distributed version, you mean the original outline.el, not the version of allout.el we have in our packages, right? I don't think there's a hurry about this, so we'll probably spend a bit of time to discuss changing the default. When you say "ready to replace" do you mean a) provides nearly full backward compatible UI plus extensions or b) it's so good users won't complain about the backward incompatibility? If the former, I'd certainly be in favor of replacement sooner rather than later. Ken> i can provide the diff if you prefer, however. CVS will do that for us, no problem. Ken> i adopted those changes. i'm hoping it won't be disruptive Ken> to adopt those conventions in the xemacs version, too. No problem. In fact, in such cases we prefer that. Ken> (i'd like to see allout continue to be available from in both Ken> true emacs, but want to do what i can to maintain only a Ken> single version...) If you're willing to spend a little extra effort, we can make you the listed maintainer of that library and give you commit privilege in our repository. Since it's a single file, you won't even need to deal with the packaging infrastructure. Just copy the GNU version over the version in your checkout of our edit-utils package, add a change log, and send us a patch (patcher.el in the xemacs-devel package is very helpful) including a note to Norbert stating whether you'd like this released quickly or whether there is more work to come and he probably should wait. Then commit (you can do that on your authority as the listed maintainer), and we're synched. This also gives you a veto over any changes _we_ might try to make to our version of the package. For committers with review authority (XEmacs Review Board members and listed maintainers of packages) we plan to eliminate the patch requirement, since our automated CVS log (aka the xemacs-cvs mailing list) already generates patches. We haven't worked that out quite yet, but I hope soon. You could also make the XEmacs repository the primary home of the allout.el library if you wanted too, but if it's already in the GNU Emacs distribution, it's much easier to synch from GNU to XEmacs than the other way around. Ken> i can make sure to revise the patch i submitted to the gnu Ken> list sooner rather than later, if you think that's important. I think that's an issue for you to coordinate with the GNU people. The question is mostly your administrative effort in keeping the two versions synched, it seems to me. -- School of Systems and Information Engineering http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Ask not how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software.