Re: Emacs for Mac OS X bundle

[David Caldwell <david@porkrind.org>]

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On 11/30/15 9:49 AM, John Wiegley wrote:
>>>>>> David Caldwell <david@porkrind.org> writes:
> 
>> For what it's worth, I run emacsformacosx.com.
> 
> Thank you so much for the service you've been providing, David! It really
> helps Mac users who want to acquire a modern GNU Emacs in a familiar way.

Thanks for the kind words.

> How hard do you think it would be to get Emacs on the App Store? Would the
> sandboxing kill us?

There's potentially a lot to sandboxing, but I don't think it is
insurmountable.

The main/most obvious issue is making find-file work inside the sandbox.
I've actually thought about this a little. I think it could be done with
the addition of a small bit of code that runs once after install. I got
the idea from the "Vox" app (which I believe is free on the store if
you'd like to try it). They open a little window into which you are
instructed to drag your hard disk from Finder. This gives them access to
the whole disk and they go off searching for music. In Emacs's case it
would hold on to that opaque token and use it as the root directory for
all filesystem related things.

Also, from my reading of it a couple years ago, the Mac App Store
licensing appears compatible with the GPL, unlike the iOS App Store. But
of course IANAL, etc.

There are probably some more sandboxed APIs that I haven't thought about
(like networking). Probably the best way is to just go for it and see
what happens.

-David



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