Re: installing features on trunk (was: using libmagic in Emacs?)

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>
> Cc: joakim@verona.se,  cyd@stupidchicken.com,  emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Tue, 18 Aug 2009 23:21:13 -0400
> 
> > I thought only relatively minor and safe ones,
> > but this one seems to break that rule, at least in my book.
> 
> It looks pretty safe

As you see, even Yidong is not sure he agrees, and neither am I.

> I was thinking of bidi for Emacs-24

If history is of any significance, I may not live until Emacs 24.  And
for some strange reason, the burden of adding this feature seems to be
on my shoulders and no one else's: no development happened in this
direction for the last several years, even though most of the
low-level code was sitting on a branch (courtesy of Handa-san) for the
last 4 years.

So I'd prefer it to happen sooner rather than later, at least to the
point where the foundations are in place and others can contribute the
rest.

> but if you have code ready for it
> and if it's not too intrusive, I'd be willing to consider it.

It is not ``ready'' in the sense that it is not yet production
quality.  It does not yet support all the features of the Emacs
display engine.  But it can already display bidirectional text, for
now only in a left-to-right paragraph and only if the text has no
faces and overlays.  The code that reorders characters for display
isn't activated until you flip a buffer-local variable, and then only
in that buffer.  Is that ``not too intrusive'' enough?