Re: Gnus update

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Frank Schmitt <ich@Frank-Schmitt.net> writes:

> David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> writes:
> 
> > How is this going to be managed?  After all, Gnus also works for
> > XEmacs.
> 
> My impression is that the number of XEmacs users is rapidly
> decreasing. Two years ago, the Emacs vs. XEmacs ratio in my
> favourite IRC channel was about 50:50. No it's 100:0. OK, perhaps I
> shouldn't generalize from this, but my guess is that in say 2006,
> nobody will talk about XEmacs anymore.

As long as it is a package philosophy to support different editors,
or even different versions of Emacs itself, one can't disregard the
implications by having both developers with just interest in the
current Emacs versions, as well as developers with interest in more
functionality coordinate their changes.

For example, we have a release cycle of once every few years for Emacs
at the moment.  The development pace of some packages might be quite
different, so that it makes sense making its code available more
often to the public.  If it only runs on current developer Emacsen,
this will suffer.

So the problem rests not only with XEmacs, even though the
compatibility issues there might be larger.  As long as some package
maintainer considers compatibility important, we should try to think
about procedures that avoid making this more complicated than
necessary.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum