Old versions of GNU Emacs

Old versions of GNU Emacs

[Ben Wing]

So far I've located 18.55, 18.59, 19.22, 19.28 and onward, and patches to
run forward from 19.7 to 19.22 and 19.23 to 19.28.  Note the gap between
19.22 and 19.23 and the oddity of finding exactly the *LAST* version in the
patch series, when running patches backwards is not easy due to added and
deleted files.

Can any clever person locate some of the older intermediate versions, or any
version older than 18.55?

Re: Old versions of GNU Emacs

[Stefan]

> So far I've located 18.55, 18.59, 19.22, 19.28 and onward, and patches to
> run forward from 19.7 to 19.22 and 19.23 to 19.28.  Note the gap between
> 19.22 and 19.23 and the oddity of finding exactly the *LAST* version in the
> patch series, when running patches backwards is not easy due to added and
> deleted files.

I seem to remember there was at least one case where no patch was
distributed because it was just too large.  Could have been between 19.22
and 19.23.

For those revs that you just can't recover, you may want to look at the
CVS repository if you want to try and re-generate the tar file.  I've done
something similar a few times to generate missing tags such as EMACS_19_34.


        Stefan

RE: Old versions of GNU Emacs

[Ben Wing]

How do I get access to the repository?  Is there read-only access
anonymously?
[presumably there's a web site?]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Stefan [mailto:monnier@iro.umontreal.ca] 
> Sent: Monday, November 15, 2004 10:57 PM
> To: Ben Wing
> Cc: xemacs-beta@xemacs.org; emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Subject: Re: Old versions of GNU Emacs
> 
> 
> > So far I've located 18.55, 18.59, 19.22, 19.28 and onward, 
> and patches 
> > to run forward from 19.7 to 19.22 and 19.23 to 19.28.  Note the gap 
> > between 19.22 and 19.23 and the oddity of finding exactly 
> the *LAST* 
> > version in the patch series, when running patches backwards is not 
> > easy due to added and deleted files.
> 
> I seem to remember there was at least one case where no patch 
> was distributed because it was just too large.  Could have 
> been between 19.22 and 19.23.
> 
> For those revs that you just can't recover, you may want to 
> look at the CVS repository if you want to try and re-generate 
> the tar file.  I've done something similar a few times to 
> generate missing tags such as EMACS_19_34.
> 
> 
>         Stefan
> 

Re: Old versions of GNU Emacs

[Miles Bader]

-- 
((lambda (x) (list x x)) (lambda (x) (list x x)))

Re: Old versions of GNU Emacs

[Miles Bader]

"Ben Wing" <ben@666.com> writes:
> How do I get access to the repository?  Is there read-only access
> anonymously?  [presumably there's a web site?]

https://savannah.gnu.org/cvs/?group=emacs

-Miles
-- 
Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra.  Suddenly it flips over,
pinning you underneath.  At night the ice weasels come.  --Nietzsche

RE: Old versions of GNU Emacs

[Ben Wing]

> "Ben Wing" <ben@666.com> writes:
> > How do I get access to the repository?  Is there read-only access 
> > anonymously?  [presumably there's a web site?]
> 
> https://savannah.gnu.org/cvs/?group=emacs

This worked but there are no tags for anything before 19.34.

Re: Old versions of GNU Emacs

[Stefan]

>> > How do I get access to the repository?  Is there read-only access 
>> > anonymously?  [presumably there's a web site?]
>> 
>> https://savannah.gnu.org/cvs/?group=emacs

> This worked but there are no tags for anything before 19.34.

Indeed.  But you can recover them (with a bit of fuzz, tho) by looking at
the ChangeLog files (they contain entries like "Version 19.30 released"
which give you approximate date and by comparing the entries around that one
to the CVS/RCS commit logs of the files, you can get a pretty close
approximation.  Note that the 19.34 tag I added is such an approximation).

Such an approximation is enough for my uses which are usually something like
"what was the old behavior" or "was this feature already available in
Emacs-19".
If you want to reconstruct tarballs that you want to be able to
untar+build, it might not be sufficient, tho.


        Stefan

RE: Old versions of GNU Emacs

[Ben Wing]

What was the first version checked into CVS?

> Indeed.  But you can recover them (with a bit of fuzz, tho) 
> by looking at the ChangeLog files (they contain entries like 
> "Version 19.30 released" which give you approximate date and 
> by comparing the entries around that one to the CVS/RCS 
> commit logs of the files, you can get a pretty close 
> approximation.  Note that the 19.34 tag I added is such an 
> approximation).

Re: Old versions of GNU Emacs

[Alfred M. Szmidt]

   What was the first version checked into CVS?

Something like 20.4 + additional changes, according to the ChangeLog
and CVS history.

Re: Old versions of GNU Emacs

[Miles Bader]

"Ben Wing" <ben@666.com> writes:
> What was the first version checked into CVS?

The date on revision 1.1 of src/editfns.c is 1991-06-29, commited by Jim
Blandy.

Judging from ChangeLog entries around that time, it _looks_ like
possibly the CVS repository was created by him when he was working on
first version of Emacs 19 -- there are many entries like "merge from
Emacs 18.59 ...", and references to version "19.0".

A quick query to Jim might get a more accurate reply, but it seems
roughly accurate to say it starts with version 19.

[My recollection is that RMS didn't use CVS for a very long time after
that though, so I suppose the CVS copy may not be authoritative for
older versions of 19.]

-Miles
-- 
"I distrust a research person who is always obviously busy on a task."
   --Robert Frosch, VP, GM Research

Re: Old versions of GNU Emacs

[Alfred M. Szmidt]

   The date on revision 1.1 of src/editfns.c is 1991-06-29, commited by Jim
   Blandy.

Interesting, I looked at revision 1.1 of the src/ChangeLog and
lisp/ChangeLog.

Re: Old versions of GNU Emacs

[Miles Bader]

"Alfred M. Szmidt" <ams@kemisten.nu> writes:
>    The date on revision 1.1 of src/editfns.c is 1991-06-29, commited by Jim
>    Blandy.
>
> Interesting, I looked at revision 1.1 of the src/ChangeLog and
> lisp/ChangeLog.

ChangeLog files are probably not a good choice, as they're periodically
futzed with to move old entries to one of the ChangeLog.N files.

-Miles
-- 
Would you like fries with that?

Re: Old versions of GNU Emacs

[Alfred M. Szmidt]

   ChangeLog files are probably not a good choice, as they're
   periodically futzed with to move old entries to one of the
   ChangeLog.N files.

Shouldn't matter, since you don't move the actual file, only the
content of it.

Re: Old versions of GNU Emacs

[Miles Bader]

"Alfred M. Szmidt" <ams@kemisten.nu> writes:
>    ChangeLog files are probably not a good choice, as they're
>    periodically futzed with to move old entries to one of the
>    ChangeLog.N files.
>
> Shouldn't matter, since you don't move the actual file, only the
> content of it.

That is what is currently recommended, but past practice varied widely.

-Miles
-- 
"Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that
 you do it."  Mahatma Gandhi

RE: Old versions of GNU Emacs

[Ben Wing]

> "Ben Wing" <ben@666.com> writes:
> > What was the first version checked into CVS?
> 
> The date on revision 1.1 of src/editfns.c is 1991-06-29, 
> commited by Jim Blandy.

Interesting -- this sounds like almost exactly the time that Lucid Emacs
started with CVS. [at least, I assume so -- Lucid Emacs was started around
April 1991 and probably used CVS from the beginning, since they had multiple
programmers and were using CVS a year or two later when Jamie was running
things.]

The existing CVS tree in XEmacs dates from late 1996, but when I worked on
Lucid Emacs at Sun in 1993, they were using TeamWare, and when at Amdahl, it
was ClearCase. [both of which blow CVS out of the water!  Yuck!]

How things have changed [RE: Old versions of GNU Emacs]

[Ben Wing]

Noah just dug up v16.56 for me.

ftp://ftp.splode.com/pub/users/friedman/emacs/

/e/download/installers/emacs 2399% ll emacs-16.56.tar.gz
-rwxrwxrwx    1 Administ None      1085612 Mar 16  1993 emacs-16.56.tar.gz*
/e/download/installers/emacs 2400% ll emacs-21.3.tar.gz
-rwxrwxrwx    1 Administ None     20399831 Oct 30 05:58 emacs-21.3.tar.gz*


epoch-4.2.tar.gz            27-Aug-1992 00:00   2.9M
lemacs-19.0.00.tar.gz            20-Apr-1992 20:11   5.6M 

Compare to:

xemacs-21.5.0.tar.gz                18-Apr-2001 03:41   9.9M 

And, uh ...

xemacs-21.5.18.tar.gz               22-Oct-2004 06:39  14.3M 
xemacs-sumo-2004-08-18.tar.gz       18-Aug-2004 05:08  28.9M
xemacs-mule-sumo-2004-08-18.tar.gz  18-Aug-2004 04:12   5.6M
------------------------------------------------------------
                                                       48.8M

Here is what c:\xemacs\symlink\man\internals\internals.texi says:

@item
GNU Emacs version 16 (first released version was 16.56) was released on
July 15, 1985.  All Gosling code was removed due to potential copyright
problems with the code.

Anyone wanna get this version up and running?

BTW In the same directory Noah has patches to get 18.59 working on Linux, so
you've already got much of the work done.

Re: How things have changed [RE: Old versions of GNU Emacs]

[Andreas Schwab]

Note that early versions of Emacs were numbered 0.something.  I don't know
when the 0. was dropped though.

Andreas.

-- 
Andreas Schwab, SuSE Labs, schwab@suse.de
SuSE Linux Products GmbH, Maxfeldstraße 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany
Key fingerprint = 58CA 54C7 6D53 942B 1756  01D3 44D5 214B 8276 4ED5
"And now for something completely different."

Re: Old versions of GNU Emacs

[Andreas Schwab]

Miles Bader <miles@lsi.nec.co.jp> writes:

> [My recollection is that RMS didn't use CVS for a very long time after
> that though, so I suppose the CVS copy may not be authoritative for
> older versions of 19.]

All versions before the import to savannah were purely RCS based.  But not
all files were under RCS, for example the ChangeLogs were only version
controlled by use of numbered backups, IIRC.  I think the import to
savannah has preserved the whole RCS history.

Andreas.

-- 
Andreas Schwab, SuSE Labs, schwab@suse.de
SuSE Linux Products GmbH, Maxfeldstraße 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany
Key fingerprint = 58CA 54C7 6D53 942B 1756  01D3 44D5 214B 8276 4ED5
"And now for something completely different."

Re: Old versions of GNU Emacs

[Stefan Monnier]

>> [My recollection is that RMS didn't use CVS for a very long time after
>> that though, so I suppose the CVS copy may not be authoritative for
>> older versions of 19.]
> All versions before the import to savannah were purely RCS based.

Actually, the move to CVS happened a bit before Savannah.  But yes, it was
during the development of Emacs-21.1 (I think it was before Emacs-20.7,
tho).

> But not all files were under RCS, for example the ChangeLogs were only
> version controlled by use of numbered backups, IIRC.

Indeed.

> I think the import to savannah has preserved the whole RCS history.

The move to CVS was done by moving the RCS files into the CVS repository.
They were then moved again when we moved to subversions.gnu.org (which
was later on accompagnied by the savannah front end).

Actually the checkin time of the ChangeLog files (i.e. 1999/09/30) is
a pretty good indicator of when the move took place:
Version 1.1. was created by Dave Love on 1999/09/30 and Gerd started to
commit things a few days later.


        Stefan

Re: Old versions of GNU Emacs

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>
> Date: Thu, 18 Nov 2004 11:43:33 -0500
> Cc: xemacs-beta@xemacs.org, Ben Wing <ben@666.com>, emacs-devel@gnu.org,
> 	Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>
> 
> Actually, the move to CVS happened a bit before Savannah.  But yes, it was
> during the development of Emacs-21.1 (I think it was before Emacs-20.7,
> tho).

That would be my recollections as well.

Re: Old versions of GNU Emacs

[Darryl Okahata]

"Ben Wing" <ben@666.com> wrote:

> Can any clever person locate some of the older intermediate versions, or any
> version older than 18.55?

I also have:

* Patches for 18.57-->18.58.

* GNU Emacs 18.58.

* Various GNU Emacs tarballs that claim to be (however, I do not
  remember if any of these are internal/private/alpha copies):

	19.0.1
	19.5
	19.9
	19.12-->19.13 diffs
	19.12
	19.13

I used to have a 17.something version, but that's on an ancient HP
cartridge tape for which I have no drive (not to mention that the tape
readability is questionable, after all these years).

-- 
	Darryl Okahata
	darrylo@soco.agilent.com

DISCLAIMER: this message is the author's personal opinion and does not
constitute the support, opinion, or policy of Agilent Technologies, or
of the little green men that have been following him all day.

RE: Old versions of GNU Emacs

[Ben Wing]

> I also have:
> 
> * Patches for 18.57-->18.58.
> 
> * GNU Emacs 18.58.
> 
> * Various GNU Emacs tarballs that claim to be (however, I do not
>   remember if any of these are internal/private/alpha copies):
> 
> 	19.0.1
> 	19.5
> 	19.9
> 	19.12-->19.13 diffs
> 	19.12
> 	19.13
> 
> I used to have a 17.something version, but that's on an 
> ancient HP cartridge tape for which I have no drive (not to 
> mention that the tape readability is questionable, after all 
> these years).

Cool, could you make this stuff available by http or ftp?