Re: Current state of python.el in the Emacs trunk

[Dave Love <fx@gnu.org>]

[This message was stuck offline.  Apologies for the late delivery.]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

>> I noticed that the original author Dave Love has an updated version on his
>> website, that, among other things, also supports Python 3. There is a note
>> in the beginning of the file that this version is not covered by FSF
>> copyright anymore. Can anybody (Dave?) shed some light on as to why there is
>> such a big discrepancy between the Emacs version and Dave's version on
>> his homepage?

There were various ill-advised changes to the Emacs fork, for one thing,
and people weren't interested in fixing the bugs as far as I can tell,
possibly because of the propaganda from the direction of the old,
less-capable mode.

> We'd be happy to do that if we could, yes.  We'd also be happy to have
> Dave help maintain our python.el directly.

It was unrewarding even to comment on bugs in it previously, and I
wouldn't want just to help and be over-ruled in things like support for
Python 3.  In fact, much of the mode should be dumped anyway in favour
of abstraction into a general framework, as intended; I don't understand
why that was rejected.

>> I would also like to volunteer to work on python.el by integrating
>> Dave's changes, and work on other issues.
>
> If you can help clear the the communication between Dave and us, that
> would be wonderful, yes.

I responded to cyd some time ago, and I don't have time to dig that or
repeat it now, sorry.  Since you're planning to replace python.el with
python-mode.el for some strange reason, I don't understand why this is
relevant or why assignment difficulties matter, otherwise I might have
been more careful.  (python-mode.el even infringes the GPL.)