Eli Zaretskii writes: > I wonder whether the Android port of Emacs, which is being developed > by Po Lu for the past few months, should be part of the upstream Emacs > and whether it should be distributed as part of the Emacs release > tarballs. The advantage of having the Android support bundled is that > we allow people to build the Android port right out of the release > tarball. However, Android is a proprietary platform, so it isn't one > of the systems that we are required to target. I also don't think > Android (and smartphones in general) will become the main, or even > important, platform for Emacs any time soon. Seeing how many people struggle to get working org-mode support on Android — the many attempts at mobile org — and that more and more people only know Android and will never own a regular computer, I think the Android port is a serious advantage. We also do not need to support any proprietary platform with it, since releases can be served via F-Droid that only provides Free Software. > An alternative would be for the Android support to be a separate > project on Savannah. Maybe in the long run this would be better? I think that this would risk becoming stale. I’d rather see a somewhat maintained port that moves slowly (but keeps working) than a separate project that moves quickly until it stops and then breaks due to some API change in Emacs which none of the Emacs developers spotted, because it only affected an external project. From my experience the maintenance work created by a big external project is larger than if the project is part of the tree, because with the external project compatibility problems are not detected by the usual tooling directly during development. Closing thought: one of the largest advantages of learning to use Emacs instead of any other tool is that Emacs can follow you wherever you go. Whatever the platform you may (be forced to?) use in the future, Emacs will be there and your skills will be an advantage. The android port closes a significant gap for this. I’ve seen several people move their workflows to proprietary web applications because “then I can use it on the tablet”. Emacs on Android can provide a viable alternative to that. Emacs is where developers are, and nowadays many developers are on Android for large parts of their time. Best wishes, Arne -- Unpolitisch sein heißt politisch sein, ohne es zu merken. draketo.de