Re: Guile emacs thread (again)

[Lluís <xscript@gmx.net>]

Christopher Allan Webber writes:
[...]
> I found it very inspiring.  It seems those things are fairly close.

> So this email is partly a:
>  - What now?  What's the chance of work towards guilemacs moving over to
>    an official emacs git branch, and that port happening, anytime soon?
>  - Is anyone running it?  How's it going for you?

I just read the thread, and many different and entwined points have been raised,
which I think make the discussion harder to follow. Thus I would like to
summarize the issues I've read regarding Guile (feel free to reply with any
points you think I've missed or misinterpreted):

* Manpower / responsiveness

  There's not much to say here. Whatever layers Emacs decides to use (if any),
  there should be an appropriate response delay to handle issues.

* Direction / design

  There could be design decisions conflicting between Emacs' and Guile's
  desires. Such issues can only be resolved through mutual and good-hearted
  understanding.

* Multi-language support

  As someone said, using Guile does not necessarily mean exposing all these
  languages in Emacs (i.e., just use Guile's lower-level compiler/VM layers).

* Development model / organization

  It has been argued that Guile's development model does not give enough
  stability assurances. I'm sure that's something that can be easily fixed if
  Guile's developers slightly change their workflow to maintain a more stable
  branch that Emacs (and other projects) can use.

* It's a GNU project

  If that really counts for any purpose.


Thus I would say that the only critical point here is the first one
(manpower/responsiveness). To some extent, the second point could be a problem
too (direction/design), but targeting Emacs to the lower-level layers of Guile
could limit the impact of this factor.


Thanks,
  Lluis

-- 
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