Re: Emacs Mac port

[Alan Third <alan@idiocy.org>]

On Sat, Mar 23, 2019 at 09:15:32AM +0900, Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:
> 
> 
> > On Mar 23, 2019, at 3:11, Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:
> > 
> > (as a general rule, while Emacs has many
> >    MacOS users, it seems very few of them are interested in
> >    contributing to fix bugs and improve the code :-(

My suspicion is that Objective C coders on Mac all use XCode, and the
people using Emacs are web developers and so on.

> Regarding the macOS port, could Mitsuharu provide a list of items
> that he thinks should be ported to the mac port so as to remove the
> need for his current port ?

I don’t know the Mac port code base very well, so apologies in advance
if I accidentally slander it, but I think the NS port has the
potential to be a leaner, simpler port than the Mac port. To get there
it needs a lot of refactoring, and ideally it would drop support for
GNUstep, and possibly some older macOS versions. I’m finding it
increasingly difficult to maintain backwards compatibility,
particularly with things like fullscreen.

OTOH, WRT the massive refactoring: if it aint broke don’t fix it. And
if we did drop GNUstep it would, IMO, defeat the purpose, and we’d be
as well switching to the Mac port because...

The Mac port has a better maintainer than me, who knows the toolkit
and things better than I could ever hope to. It ties into macOS better
(I use very little macOS specific software, and the whole ‘services’
thing is a mystery to me, for example). It doesn’t have the Mojave
redraw problems that have me completely scunnered at the moment. It
handles concurrency better. It is simply better maintained.

But then again, the Mac port makes use of things that gcc doesn’t
support, like ObjC blocks, so that would probably rule it out as an
official port immediately.

The duplication of effort to maintain two ports seems like a waste to
me, but there are definitely barriers to joining forces and having
only one, official, port.

But Apple may solve this one for us anyway:

    https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/03/20/macos_clampdown_rumors/
    
;)
-- 
Alan Third