lua mode

lua mode

[Tomas Zerolo]

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Dear Emacs developers,

I'm an user of Lua mode, written by Christian Vogler et al. Yesterday I
contacted him, asking what he thinks about integrating it into the Emacs
distribution. 

He kindly answered that he would be fine with that but then would have to
hand off maintenance due to lack of time. So I offered to do the
footwork (meaning he did the hard work and I make now the noise ;-)

Christian is OK signing papers, I'd have to approach the other authors
bfore anything goes (I'd have to sign papers as well).

Now I haven't maintained any Emacs package up to now, so I would very
much appreciate your guidance, if this thing happens.

One thing Christian wishes is that the package continues to work well
with XEmacs. Thus I might need special guidance with those of you
experienced in maintenance of such dual packages.

Lua is a ``small language'' and its implementation, with a free license
(Lua 4.0 has its own, zlib-like, lua 5.0 is MIT). See e.g.

  <http://www.lua.org/about.html>

Comments? Suggestions?

Thanks
-- tomás

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Re: lua mode

[David Kastrup]

tomas@tuxteam.de (Tomas Zerolo) writes:

> I'm an user of Lua mode, written by Christian Vogler et
> al. Yesterday I contacted him, asking what he thinks about
> integrating it into the Emacs distribution.
>
> He kindly answered that he would be fine with that but then would
> have to hand off maintenance due to lack of time. So I offered to do
> the footwork (meaning he did the hard work and I make now the noise
> ;-)
>
> Christian is OK signing papers, I'd have to approach the other
> authors bfore anything goes (I'd have to sign papers as well).
>
> Now I haven't maintained any Emacs package up to now, so I would
> very much appreciate your guidance, if this thing happens.
>
> One thing Christian wishes is that the package continues to work
> well with XEmacs. Thus I might need special guidance with those of
> you experienced in maintenance of such dual packages.

You have to be aware that the package in the CVS will be distributed
as part of Emacs, and thus it has to be under the GPL, and every
contributor needs to have his copyright assigned to the FSF.  XEmacs
development headquarters in general does not bother about assignments
too much.  That means that if you have XEmacs-only contributors, they
can't work even on the XEmacs parts of LUA-mode without assigning
copyright to the FSF, and some XEmacs contributors/developers would
rather refrain than do that (some prefer XEmacs for exactly that
reason).  So that's the downpoint.

With regard to XEmacs support: the current maintainer of the mode (in
this case, you) decides about the policies.  That would mean it would
be basically your responsibility to make reasonably sure the stuff
continues working under XEmacs in case other Emacs developers make
additions and fixes.  If you pass on maintainership at some point of
time, finding an XEmacs-aware successor might be more difficult with
the mode being maintained as part of Emacs.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum

Re: lua mode

[Tomas Zerolo]

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Thanks, David for your comments.

On Tue, Sep 27, 2005 at 09:20:47AM +0200, David Kastrup wrote:
> tomas@tuxteam.de (Tomas Zerolo) writes:
> 
> > I'm an user of Lua mode, written by Christian Vogler et
> > al. [...]

> You have to be aware that the package in the CVS will be distributed
> as part of Emacs, and thus it has to be under the GPL, and every
> contributor needs to have his copyright assigned to the FSF.

Yes, I am aware of that. Christian has already stated that it is OK with
him to sign papers. If there is interest in integrating lua-mode into
Emacs, I'd try to reach the other distributors mentioned in the
copyright notice and try to find out whether there are other,
unmentioned.

>                                                               XEmacs
> development headquarters in general does not bother about assignments
> too much.  That means that if you have XEmacs-only contributors, they
> can't work even on the XEmacs parts of LUA-mode without assigning
> copyright to the FSF, and some XEmacs contributors/developers would
> rather refrain than do that (some prefer XEmacs for exactly that
> reason).  So that's the downpoint.

I see. I'll write to the (known) contributors (the package is not that
large, so it seems very probable they are all).

> With regard to XEmacs support: the current maintainer of the mode (in
> this case, you) decides about the policies.  That would mean it would
> be basically your responsibility to make reasonably sure the stuff
> continues working under XEmacs in case other Emacs developers make
> additions and fixes.

Yes, I'd try to do that.

>                       If you pass on maintainership at some point of
> time, finding an XEmacs-aware successor might be more difficult with
> the mode being maintained as part of Emacs.

Yes, I see the point.

Thanks
-- tomás

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Re: lua mode

[Stefan Monnier]

> I'm an user of Lua mode, written by Christian Vogler et al. Yesterday I
> contacted him, asking what he thinks about integrating it into the Emacs
> distribution. 

> He kindly answered that he would be fine with that but then would have to
> hand off maintenance due to lack of time. So I offered to do the
> footwork (meaning he did the hard work and I make now the noise ;-)

> Christian is OK signing papers, I'd have to approach the other authors
> bfore anything goes (I'd have to sign papers as well).

> Now I haven't maintained any Emacs package up to now, so I would very
> much appreciate your guidance, if this thing happens.

As you obviously know, one part of Emacs integration is the legal paperwork.
You seem to understand this part.  I wouldn't worry too much about the few
people who might refuse to sign papers, who by the way are not all related
to XEmacs and far from all XEmacs people refuse to sign paperwork, so it's
unfair to associate the problem with the XEmacs project.  When I collected
the paperwork for PCL-CVS, I've had to deal with one author who wouldn't
sign papers and another who I simply wasn't able to reach.  The end result
was simply that I had to check more carefully their contribution and
remove/rewrite the corresponding code (PCL-CVS was an old package, so some
of the code could be removed without affecting anything because it had been
superceded anyway).

> One thing Christian wishes is that the package continues to work well
> with XEmacs. Thus I might need special guidance with those of you
> experienced in maintenance of such dual packages.

This part of the maintenance is up to you.  Basically, being integrated in
Emacs means that it will live in the Emacs CVS repository, that Emacs
maintainers may make minor changes in it without warning (which may
temporarily break XEmacs compatibility or even compatibility with older
Emacsen), and that it has to adapt to the freeze state before a release
(but you can keep on working if you do it on a branch, anyway).
I.e. you can make XEmacs specific changes just fine.


        Stefan

Re: lua mode

[Richard M. Stallman]

    Lua is a ``small language'' and its implementation, with a free license
    (Lua 4.0 has its own, zlib-like, lua 5.0 is MIT). See e.g.

Is Lua mode a mode for editing programs written in Lua?
(The answer to that question is not self-evident.)

If so, the only question is whether it is used widely
enough to make it desirable to include the code in Emacs.

Re: lua mode

[Christian Vogler]

On Tuesday 27 September 2005 05:58 pm, Richard M. Stallman wrote:
>     Lua is a ``small language'' and its implementation, with a free license
>     (Lua 4.0 has its own, zlib-like, lua 5.0 is MIT). See e.g.
>
> Is Lua mode a mode for editing programs written in Lua?
> (The answer to that question is not self-evident.)

No, Lua mode is written in Emacs Lisp. As a matter of fact, it 
originally was based off tcl.el when I got my hands on it. Nowadays very 
little of the original code remains, though.

Best regards
- Christian

Re: lua mode

[Daniel Brockman]

Christian,

What Richard meant was

   ``Is Lua mode a mode for editing programs-written-in-Lua?''

but you interpreted it as

   ``Is Lua mode a mode-for-editing-programs written in Lua?''

Good one. :-)

-- 
Daniel Brockman <daniel@brockman.se>

Re: lua mode

[Christian Vogler]

On a second reading, sorry, I may have misunderstood the question.

> Is Lua mode a mode for editing programs written in Lua?
> (The answer to that question is not self-evident.)

Yes, lua-mode is for editing Lua programs. I don't know how widely the Emacs 
mode itself is used, but the language itself has enormously increased in 
popularity in the past two years, judging by the number of projects that use 
it and the mailing list traffic (see http://www.lua.org).

- Christian

Re: lua mode

[Richard M. Stallman]

    Yes, lua-mode is for editing Lua programs. I don't know how widely the Emacs 
    mode itself is used, but the language itself has enormously increased in 
    popularity in the past two years, judging by the number of projects that use 
    it and the mailing list traffic (see http://www.lua.org).

In that case, we would be glad to include it,
presuming the papers are signed, etc.

Re: lua mode

[Tomas Zerolo]

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On Tue, Sep 27, 2005 at 05:58:39PM -0400, Richard M. Stallman wrote:
>     Lua is a ``small language'' [...]
> Is Lua mode a mode for editing programs written in Lua?
> (The answer to that question is not self-evident.)

Yes, I was unclear, sorry. Christian answered already to that.

> If so, the only question is whether it is used widely
> enough to make it desirable to include the code in Emacs.

I can't quantify that. Lua is a nice language, wich I discovered for
teaching (combined with a nifty game which is wonderfully hackable it
makes for a very powerful motivator, but I disgress ;-).

Just for trivia: Freshmeat (a kind of directory of mostly free
programming projects) lists 16 projects using Lua (7668 in C, 46 in AWK,
23 in Forth, 13 in Pike, as random points of comparison). But don't
take those numbers very seriously.

Regards
-- tomas

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Lua mode

[Miles Bader]

Was somebody going to query the lua-mode authors about putting lua-mode
into Emacs (I have a vague memory that somebody was but I don't remember
who)?

If so, any response?

[The version I have says:

;; Author: 2006 Juergen Hoetzel <juergen@hoetzel.info>
;;         2004 various (support for Lua 5 and byte compilation)
;;         2001 Christian Vogler <cvogler@gradient.cis.upenn.edu>
;;         1997 Bret Mogilefsky <mogul-lua@gelatinous.com> starting from
;;              tcl-mode by Gregor Schmid <schmid@fb3-s7.math.tu-berlin.de>
;;              with tons of assistance from
;;              Paul Du Bois <pld-lua@gelatinous.com> and
;;              Aaron Smith <aaron-lua@gelatinous.com>.

]

Thanks,

-Miles

-- 
Ich bin ein Virus. Mach' mit und kopiere mich in Deine .signature.

Re: Lua mode

[Glenn Morris]

Miles Bader wrote:

> Was somebody going to query the lua-mode authors about putting
> lua-mode into Emacs (I have a vague memory that somebody was but I
> don't remember who)?

I wrote to Juergen Hoetzel in October.

> If so, any response?

He replied on this list, saying:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2007-10/msg00308.html

    I took maintainer-ship for Lua-mode in May 2006. I only wrote part
    of the code.

    There are some issues with the current codebase. The indention
    code is quite a hack.

    So i decided to not work on current codebase anymore. Instead I'm
    doing a complete clean rewrite for GNU Emacs 22 at the moment. By
    the way this will solve the copyright issue. I will keep you
    informed on this list.