Request: new emacs release

[Adrian Robert <arobert@cogsci.ucsd.edu>]

Hi all,

I am sorry to bother the developer list if this is not felt 
appropriate, but I just wanted a user's perspective (not sure how 
typical) to be heard..

I am a long-time emacs user frustrated with the current state and 
worried from the tone of developer discussions here that no release 
will be coming for a long time.  I'm listing my personal list of 
reasons for wanting a new release, FWIW, and not with any intention of 
bashing, just in the spirit of giving feedback from a user 
perspective..


1) Mac OS X

Due to various maintainership incidents, the only option for Panther 
users to obtain a working, non-ancient aqua emacs is to compile the CVS 
"21.3.50" from source.  However due to no release plans being made, 
this is a hit-or-miss affair -- bugs I've observed in recent attempts 
include font-lock "regexp" colorizing not being performed, startup 
failure due to lisp load errors, difficulties getting third-party 
packages to run smoothly, and frequent (1+ per day) crashes.  Even the 
binary packages available on the net, which tend to be from better CVS 
snapshots, still exhibit crashing and other bugs.

XEmacs is not really an option because it only works on OS X under X11 
(and therefore uses ugly font rendering, etc.).

I know there is opposition to making OS X much of a priority in the 
FSF, and I personally wish Apple would lend a hand in some way, but I 
thought it was at least decided to provide a version.  Right now this 
only exists in CVS.


2) Fringe customization

For 4 years now, users wishing to use emacs 21 have had to live with 
the unsuppressable super-wide double-fringe that came with that 
version.  Many times this makes the difference between showing two 
windows size-by-side in a reasonably-sized font and not, and it takes 
real estate from other windows in all cases.  Many others have 
complained about this.

"21.3.50" makes it configurable.  (This was promised for 21.3 and 
didn't make it in.)  Furthermore it updates the buffer window behavior 
to NOT take up an extra line after every 80 column line, using the 
fringe to mark this instead.  This is a bigger deal for people who edit 
code than it may seem.  I've tried compiling a CVS emacs to get the 
21.3.50 behavior, but see above on my luck with hitting CVS on a good 
day..


3) Time passage

It has been 1 year since 21.3.  Aside from the major improvements (Mac 
OS X support and fringe customizability) mentioned above, there must 
have been many other worthwhile things done in this time -- it would be 
nice to have them in a release.  Also, the cleaning out of bugs that 
comes with making a release might improve general development 
efficiency (know there are differing opinions on this)..


best regards,
Adrian Robert