xemacs vs emacs

[Reiner Steib]

On Sun, Apr 06 2008, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> Reiner Steib writes:
>  > But even the versions in "pre-release" are outdated.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.

I think what you wrote...

>>> The Emacs project is generally more active, and XEmacs currently
>>> lags by several years in several programmer-oriented applications
>>> maintained by GNU Emacs, such as comint and gdb support.  However,
>>> most third-party projects such as Gnus, CEDET, and AUCTeX continue
>>> to support XEmacs, and XEmacs includes more libraries in its
>>> package distribution than GNU Emacs does in its monolithic
>>> distribution.

... might give the wrong impression that an XEmacs user receives more
current and supported versions of "third-party" packages such as Gnus
and AUCTeX compared to using Emacs.  (Not sure if "third-party" is a
correct description for Gnus.  Gnus is part of Emacs, just maintained
in a separate repository and released stand-alone as well.  Similar to
Tramp.)

Yes, AUCTeX is not included in the monolithic Emacs distribution.  But
one might argue that requiring the user to install it separately is
better than shipping an outdated version.  But let's hope that Mats
and Uwe (see below) will finally succeed in providing a current
version of AUCTeX in the XEmacs packages.

> In the case of Gnus, that is Mike Kupfer, who is taking his time but
> definitely not abandoning the packages.  

[See my response to Mike.]

> 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.

Interesting... that a large financial firm cares about (X)Emacs at
all.  ;-) Do you have an URL?

If the (X)Emacs installation is done in a centralized way by the IT
department, it's not surprising to me.

> What version of Gnus is in Emacs 21?  

Gnus 5.9 (which more or less corresponds to something like Gnus 5.8.7).

> Will the version of Gnus ever change in the lifetime of Emacs 22?

The version _number_ won't change, but we will continue to install
bugfixes.  See e.g. the diff between Gnus in Emacs 22.1 and 22.2:

v5-10/lisp$ cvs diff -u -r emacs_22_1 -r emacs_22_2 | \
            grep -e '^\+[^+;]' | wc -l
1203

> How much hope do you have that Emacs 23 will be released in less
> than 5 years, 

Personally, I'm confident that the new maintainers (Stefan Monnier and
Chong Yidong) will manage to release faster.

> and how many versions of Gnus will be released in that time?

Emacs 23.1 will include Gnus 5.13 (aka No Gnus, the current
development version of Gnus).  This version is already in the CVS
trunk.

(Not sure why you ask these question in this context, though.)

>  > AUCTeX
>
> AUCTeX is a special case; the AUCTeX project maintainer objects to the
> XEmacs package system in principle

I don't speak for David, but I think he objects to outdated packages
and some of the policies, not to the system itself.  (But we had more
than enough discussion about this on this list already.)

> (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.

Good to hear.

Bye, Reiner.
-- 
       ,,,
      (o o)
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