From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: David Kastrup Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.devel Subject: Re: GTK file selector Date: Sun, 18 Dec 2005 01:38:33 +0100 Message-ID: <85fyor6xyu.fsf@lola.goethe.zz> References: <1134552456.439fe58850f31@imp5-g19.free.fr> <878xuma53q.fsf@jurta.org> <17313.37186.344268.487103@parhasard.net> <87d5jxsgib.fsf@jurta.org> <17314.42778.220813.47226@parhasard.net> <17315.7877.155144.973236@kahikatea.snap.net.nz> <85irtoadgf.fsf@lola.goethe.zz> <87lkyk62zc.fsf@marant.org> <85acf0a9zx.fsf@lola.goethe.zz> <87zmmzoov9.fsf@marant.org> <853bkr92a0.fsf@lola.goethe.zz> <17316.36711.500818.283095@parhasard.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: main.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-Trace: sea.gmane.org 1134866737 18064 80.91.229.2 (18 Dec 2005 00:45:37 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@sea.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 18 Dec 2005 00:45:37 +0000 (UTC) Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org Original-X-From: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Sun Dec 18 01:45:28 2005 Return-path: Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([199.232.76.165]) by ciao.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1EnmdL-0000mH-8a for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org; Sun, 18 Dec 2005 01:42:39 +0100 Original-Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1] helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1Enme6-0000oQ-OG for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org; Sat, 17 Dec 2005 19:43:26 -0500 Original-Received: from mailman by lists.gnu.org with tmda-scanned (Exim 4.43) id 1Enmd3-0000dy-Fb for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Sat, 17 Dec 2005 19:42:22 -0500 Original-Received: from exim by lists.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.43) id 1Enmd1-0000cp-NM for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Sat, 17 Dec 2005 19:42:20 -0500 Original-Received: from [199.232.76.173] (helo=monty-python.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1Enmd0-0000cS-Sv for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Sat, 17 Dec 2005 19:42:19 -0500 Original-Received: from [199.232.76.164] (helo=fencepost.gnu.org) by monty-python.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.34) id 1Enmfh-0000so-9s for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Sat, 17 Dec 2005 19:45:05 -0500 Original-Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1] helo=lola.goethe.zz) by fencepost.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.34) id 1Enmab-0000Ys-Ka; Sat, 17 Dec 2005 19:39:50 -0500 Original-Received: by lola.goethe.zz (Postfix, from userid 1002) id B28431C4F93E; Sun, 18 Dec 2005 01:38:33 +0100 (CET) Original-To: Aidan Kehoe In-Reply-To: <17316.36711.500818.283095@parhasard.net> (Aidan Kehoe's message of "Sat, 17 Dec 2005 23:21:27 +0100") User-Agent: Gnus/5.11 (Gnus v5.11) Emacs/22.0.50 (gnu/linux) X-BeenThere: emacs-devel@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: "Emacs development discussions." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Original-Sender: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Errors-To: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.emacs.devel:47972 Archived-At: Aidan Kehoe writes: > > And yet, nobody apparently used this functionality for years and > > years. A lot of the stuff in XEmacs is like that: implemented, > > and left unused because it has, maybe because of the roughness of > > APIs and documentation, not been tied into any application in > > frequent use. > > And maybe because anything implemented using the XEmacs-specific > APIs will never run on GNU Emacs, so coders tend to put off writing > code to use a feature until that feature makes it into GNU Emacs, at > which point XEmacs provides a compatibility API--the reverse is > never true. Eminently rational behaviour. I can only speak for myself. I tried using and working with images when XEmacs was the only variant providing them. I failed. I was completely unable to make heads or tails of the available documentation. The whole details with specifiers and instantiators and stuff like that was completely opaque. References in the manual pointed you to other places in the manual, no examples were there, terminology was not defined. In short: it was completely unusable unless you were willing to get intimate with the code itself and find out what this was supposed to be all about. The preview-latex project basically lay dormant until Emacs acquired image support. It became a matter of professional pride to make it work under XEmacs, too, after it worked under Emacs already. After I had in the past given several rants about the quality of documentation, things were supposed to have improved. I tried several times to get it to work, and failed. Some volunteer tried his hand, and gave up. Finally I got a core developer from XEmacs interested in the problem. It took him months to port this to XEmacs, partly because XEmacs image code was still not documented usefully for all but the people really into the XEmacs code base, partly because the XEmacs image code was chock full of bugs. As well as the process handling. Bugs I could not possibly have imagined, circumvented, or reliably tracked down. Bugs in functionality that was claimed to have been working for quite a few years. preview-latex is an application that works with the purported strong points of XEmacs. It would have been utterly impossible to get it to work without the help of an internal XEmacs programmer who worked out how to do stuff that was missing in the documentation, and who fixed most of the bugs that were simply everywhere. In contrast, the documentation of Emacs was comprehensible, and stuff basically worked. There were redisplay errors: I think I sent at least a dozen separate bug reports about them to Gerd M=F6llmann. But those were locatable, and not of the "things crash" or "impossible to figure out how this is supposed to work" variety. And the manual was sufficient for finding out how things were supposed to work. If things don't get ported to XEmacs until there is a compatibility API, this can simply be because the native API is incomprehensible, if it works at all. Point the fingers all you want, but you are deluding yourself if you imagine that the waning popularity of XEmacs among developers is just a matter of religious beliefs. --=20 David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum