Release plans [was: Building packages with 21.5b29?]

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Removing addresses of folks who are not-necessarily-fascinated by the
issue, and subscribe to the list anyway.

Rodney Sparapani writes:

 > I appreciate being brought into this discussion.  I'm going to be
 > tied up for a few months, but, in my view, FFI is the future of
 > XEmacs (is SXEmacs still around?  haven't heard much from them
 > lately).

I believe so.  They have their own lists and stuff, so they only show
up here when they have something important to say.

 > If anyone else cares, I'd like to be able to use FFI with
 > R, OpenBUGS and, possibly, TeXmacs.

For R, I would think it's feasible, but I'm really not sure what net
benefit that would have.  On the one hand, it's true that comint
interfaces are pretty finicky.  But on the other, they're a lot more
flexible than FFI would be for "on the fly" variations.  Dunno about
OpenBUGS, I don't even know what it is (although I probably can
guess).

For TeXmacs, I suspect it would be quite fiddly.  I guess you have in
mind something like passing a buffer to TeXmacs for display?

 > I suppose we are talking about Linux only,

No, we're talking about GCC on platforms which support GCC-style FFI
(I forget whether this is libffi or not).  This includes at least
Linux, *BSD, and Mac OS X.  ISTR you had problems with it on Solaris,
or were aware of problems on Solaris.  But it's not limited to Linux,
for sure.

In theory there should be similar facilities on other platforms like
Solaris and BeOS, but somebody would have to port.