Re: Android port of Emacs

[chad <yandros@gmail.com>]

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We've seen a couple positions put forward that I will paraphrase as "I
personally see  strong potential in Emacs for Android, although I
don't/wouldn't really use it right away." As near as I can tell, these
positions are tangential to Eli's point which I will summarize as "The
Android port is great, and we should probably give it _some_ support, but
maybe that level is lower than everything expressed and implied by
incorporating it directly into the mainline emacs repository?"

I am personally sympathetic to both views, and (at the risk of
forking/hijacking the thread a bit), I would even go so far as to say that
Emacs as a project might benefit from spinning out at least the Android
port (which is new and very maintained, but has a very high bus factor) and
also the NS port (which is not new, shows some downsides of high bus-factor
parts, and has at least one well-maintained alternative outside the
mainline Emacs repo: the mac port).

As a technical matter, it seems like it's probably easier to maintain some
abstraction barriers along OS and window-system code by virtue of having a
single repo that supports 3-5 "variants", but in practice that _seems_ to
have mostly resulted in treating a quite old "posix-y-unix with X11" as the
baseline, and then adapting everything to that. This seems (again, I'm not
an expert here) to have caused some continuing pain with respect to GTK and
the pgtk port (particularly in the very high incidence of people using pgtk
in wayland+X environments where it's not supported, kinda works, and breaks
in not-so-rare corner cases).

Taking the NS port as an example, if the mainline were to drop support for
the ns port, this would nudge some macOS users over to the mac port, strand
some users of quite old macOS versions, and isolate the users of the
GNUStep port. My belief is that the mac port is already quite popular, the
people stuck on old mac OS X versions are already stuck with library and
compiler version issues, and the GNUStep port has very little actual usage
(I wouldn't be surprised to learn that "testing GNUStep support" is the
single largest user-base of GNUStep" at this point.)

Before discussing whether these tradeoffs are worth it or not, is anything
I've said above obviously wrong, under-informed, or out of date?

~Chad

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