Re: Emacs on OS X development

[YAMAMOTO Mitsuharu <mituharu@math.s.chiba-u.ac.jp>]

>>>>> On Sun, 29 Jul 2012 18:31:04 -0400, Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com> said:

> Let me ask a different series of questions, hoping to understand how
> we can improve the Emacs experience on Mac OS X.

> If the Mac port was part of Emacs, would you continue to contribute
> to it there, handle Emacs bugs against it, and keep up with core
> changes that affect it?

I'm not willing to do that if OS X users consider the NS port enough.
The maintainers wouldn't agree for the inclusion of the Mac port
unless many OS X users say the NS port is not good enough, anyway.

From my experience in the maintenance of the Carbon port, keeping it
work with short delay in the trunk requires enough motivation.  If
many people consider the Mac port simply full of features that are
only meaningful for specific kind of people among OS X users, then I
would rather keep it separated and avoid being bothered with frequent
catch-up.

> If we found a way for the two ports to coexist in one source tree
> inside Emacs by using #ifdefs and other mechanisms, would you keep
> working on the Mac port?  Or does it have to be a separate source
> tree?

The Mac port is supposed not to break the other builds, though I don't
test it in every release.

> Are there special tools required to build the Mac port, which casual
> developers won't have?

No.  You don't even need to install external libraries such as librsvg
or libotf to support SVG display or text shaping, respectively.  Image
scaling/rotation/cropping, which would be provided via ImageMagick for
X11 builds, are emulated using the Image I/O framework that is bundled
with OS X as well as iOS (GNUstep is also to support it via Opal?).
Optionally you can use librsvg or ImageMagick if you really want them.

				     YAMAMOTO Mitsuharu
				mituharu@math.s.chiba-u.ac.jp