Unicodification of sources, part 1

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

>>>>> "Aidan" == Aidan Kehoe <kehoea at parhasard.net> writes:

    Aidan> The reason I haven~t proposed anything remotely like this
    Aidan> up to now is that once we~re at the point where the
    Aidan> release branch has been stable for a while and has good
    Aidan> support for UTF-8, we can deprecate 21.4 and do all the
    Aidan> things you listed in a week, without the need for a
    Aidan> parallel set of Mule packages. Which would seem to be more
    Aidan> economic of effort.

*Deprecating 21.4* (in the sense of ending the promise to try to
support packages on it) is also probably a minimum of 24 months away,
and the parallel set of Mule packages is also many months away.  I'd
like to start moving in that direction soon.

    Aidan> Mike~s point about the impact on 21.4 equally applies to
    Aidan> SXEmacs;

At the moment, SXEmacs is not our problem, and it's in any case quite
a different problem, since 21.4 is going to be obsoleted in the
(vaguely ;-) foreseeable future, while (selfish desire for more
manpower aside ;-) I certainly hope that's not true for SXEmacs.

    Aidan> I think the best way to support Unicode on 21.4 and SXEmacs
    Aidan> would be to port over Ben~s 21.5 Unicode support,

I tend to disagree.  The 21.5 Unicode support is seriously twisted
around Windows support and the whole Mule infrastructure.  SXEmacs
doesn't want any Windows baggage, and probably could benefit from
losing Mule, too.  90% of the Mule-related C code seems to be devoted
to variable-width character gymnastics.  "Why should we impose on them
a burden which we ourselves are unable to carry?"

If SXEmacs wants Unicode, I think their best path is to rip out Mule
support and support Unicode directly with fixed-width buffers.  They
can use Ben's codecs, or even port Python's architecture.  They'll be
unable to compete in the "stubborn Mule" market, sure, but do they
really want to when there's both GNU Emacs and XEmacs to serve that
niche?  Only my two yen, of course; but if Steve et cie. are
interested in my opinion, that's it.


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