future of quail

[Julian Bradfield]

On 2011-02-15, David Kastrup <dak at gnu.org> wrote:
> Julian Bradfield <jcb+xeb at jcbradfield.org> writes:
>> On 2011-02-15, David Kastrup <dak at gnu.org> wrote:
>>> Julian Bradfield <jcb+xeb at jcbradfield.org> writes:
>>>> Such as distributed closed-source software and charging for licensing?
>>> Oh, that's normal with proprietary software licenses?  Interesting.  So
>> Yes. You want to use a widget kit for your proprietary software, you
>> go and buy a developers' licence for a proprietary widget set. It will
>> allow you to distribute and sell your software under your own terms,
> Including complete readable source code for the whole application
> including the widget set?

Ah. I've just noticed that we have been at cross-purposes, because I
didn't type what I intended to say. I intended to say "distribut*ing*
closed-source software" - i.e. what closed source libraries give over
GPL is the freedom to distribute your software closed source and for
money. I wasn't talking about what you get in the way of source for
the libraries you're using.

> The one thing impressing me immensively is that Stephen is _not_ himself
> of the post-war generation and attitude.  And still did a remarkable job
> reintroducing sanity.  Without sacrificing his dignity.

I entirely agree.

> Unicode is not exactly trivial.  Lots of headstart on Emacs' site, not

I know. It took me several weeks' work to switch 21.4 to unicode, just
at the basic level. Full Unicode conformance is a *long* way off.

> Emacs has pretty solid right-to-left support in the development

I started thinking about bidi, but I don't yet have a significant need
for it. If I ever get round to learning Arabic...

> versions, and there are things happening in the area of the Lisp machine
> (parallelism, closures) that are interesting as well.  And lots of stuff

Ah, but are they useful.

> across the board, and good desktop integration into Gnome desktops, and
> better support for MacOSX and Windows than XEmacs has.

Since I don't use Gnome, MacOSX or Windows, that's not of much concern
to me.

It's knowing what of the "stuff across the board" is actually useful
that I find hard. Like finding out what packages are useful. I know
there are thousands of purportedly useful Emacs packages, but I don't
use any of them.