Re: Changes 2009-07-15/16 in branch?

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

>>>>> On Sun, 26 Jul 2009 22:44:38 -0400, Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> said:

>     They sound like a really important policy change: allowing a
>     proprietary platform to be the first one to have features that
>     are not specific to the platform.  Are you sure?

> I don't think that description applies to these things.  I would
> call them adaptations of existing features to fit the platform.

I don't think so.

> Specifying colors with a slightly different format is not
> particularly useful except for compatibility with MacOS.  If we ever
> find that discourages someone from moving away from the Macintosh,
> we could make Emacs accept those formats on other platforms -- it
> won'tbe hard -- but I doubt that will happen.

These NS-port-specific formats are not what's defined by Apple, IIUC.
They are arbitrarily defined by the author.

Different format is actually a problem of compatibility, but not so
important for the GNU policy.

What I'm concerning about with respect to the GNU policy is the
"alpha-component" (or maybe "alpha-channel" is more familiar) support,
which was added only for Cocoa.  Alpha-component/alpha-channel
controls translucency of colors by specifying how opaque it is.  This
feature is not specific to NS or Cocoa: X11 can do this with cairo
and/or some extensions, but it is not yet implemented for Emacs on
free platforms at all.

> As for tiling instead of stippling, perhaps I have misunderstood.
> Do you think some users will see that as a feature?

What Miles pointed out as "never really worked correctly" does not
mean X11 does tiling instead of stippling.  X11 actually does
stippling, but you will soon see some inconsistent result if you apply
pictorial stippling to large area and do some editing:

  (set-face-stipple 'default "eschernot")

On the other hand, tiling support for X11 has been controversial about
its inclusion, and it has not been added to the main line whereas
there has been an implementation by Miles Bader for a long time.  I
don't understand why the NS port can add the tiling support under the
name of "stippling".  (Of course, I believe that mistake happened
unintentionally.)

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