xemacs vs emacs

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Reiner Steib writes:
 > On Fri, Apr 04 2008, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
 > 
 > > However, most third-party projects such as Gnus, CEDET, and AUCTeX
 > > continue to support XEmacs, 
 > 
 > Well, for Gnus and AUCTeX "support" is more like "don't break
 > compatibility with XEmacs deliberately".  Both projects have no active
 > developers doing much more than cursory testing on XEmacs.

I call that support, given that we're hardly doing any more at the
moment.  We are very grateful for the efforts you do make, and you
respond very quickly when XEmacs developers or users have questions or
problems.

 > But even the versions in "pre-release" are outdated.

Keeping up-to-date is a non-goal for the core developers.  That's one
point of the package system, to off-load that onto user-maintainers.
In the case of Gnus, that is Mike Kupfer, who is taking his time but
definitely not abandoning the packages.  In the case of AUCTeX, that
is Uwe Brauer with help from Mats Lidell, who have been active
recently, but are stuck because we need to make changes to the core to
support what they're doing.

Also, I will point out to you that in a recent survey (pre-Emacs-22.1)
of a large financial firm getting over 200 responses from Emacs-using
developers, over half were using obsolete versions of XEmacs or Emacs.
What version of Gnus is in Emacs 21?  Will the version of Gnus ever
change in the lifetime of Emacs 22?  How much hope do you have that
Emacs 23 will be released in less than 5 years, and how many versions
of Gnus will be released in that time?

 > AUCTeX

AUCTeX is a special case; the AUCTeX project maintainer objects to the
XEmacs package system in principle (although he, and the project, has
always been good about supporting XEmacs users of AUCTeX).  Unless
that changes, or somebody with good knowledge of both projects decides
to take over maintainership, that will make working on AUCTeX harder
than it could be.  The latter could be happening, since Mats Lidell
has joined the Review Board.