Re: Icon designer wanted (Aquamacs Emacs)

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman.073@student.lu.se> writes:

> David Kastrup wrote:
>
>>Correct.  But the work that I have been criticising was intended to
>>make it _harder_ to switch from MacOSX to GNU/Linux, by providing
>>features only for MacOSX.
>
> Thanks. If you see it this way then I understand what you write. It
> is however still a bit difficult whether some things that can not be
> made portable at the moment really makes it harder to
> switch. (Please excuse me if I am drifting off a bit here. I do that
> to be more clear.) Suppose those things makes Emacs more acceptable
> on that particular proprietary platform. Suppose also that those
> things depends on OS features that does not yet exist on
> GNU/Linux.

Please.  We were talking about the standard toolbar icons here which
are the same on all platforms.  Those are obviously in need of
improvement, and David asked for volunteers to improve them
exclusively for the use of Aquamacs (since he made quite clear that he
was not going to bother about the legal requirements necessary for the
mainline).

So you are obviously discussing something different here.  I'll give
my opinion on your questions nevertheless, but they are not directly
relevant to the case in question.

> Is it in the long run then better to provide those things on the
> proprietary platform or not?

Better for who?

> To me the answer is not self evident. Providing this "things" could
> in the long run make a pressure on GNU/Linux to provide them too.

What is good about pressure?  Pressure does not resolve itself
magically without somebody actually having to work on it.  If some
functionality is worth working on it, it will be so without artificial
pressure to mimic a proprietary system.

> I have the feeling that this could be the case for some things in
> the GUI for example. (Last time I tried GNU/Linux I dropped it
> partly because I did not understand how to use the keyboard for all
> tasks. I never use mouse if I can avoid it: For sure I want to try
> again, but I want that "thing" to be implemented in GNU/Linux - in a
> manner that I should not have to relearn. That is me of course, but
> I suspect there are more persons like me in that respect.)

Basically it is a matter of which window manager you use.  There are
some of them explicitly designed for mouse avoidance.

>>There is a difference between making Emacs available for proprietary
>>systems (which makes it easier for people to switch from proprietary
>>to free systems), and improving it for proprietary systems only
>>(which makes it harder for people to switch from proprietary to free
>>systems).
>
> You are right. But I want to add that improving it for GNU/Linux
> only also can make it harder for people to switch from proprietary
> to free systems.

But this is not what the case is about at all.  I find it disengenuous
to put forth an argument like "it is ok to improve generally desirable
Emacs features only on a specific MacOSX port, because improving
generally desirable features only on GNU/Linux could be a bad idea,
too".

There are priorities involved here: when the available resources don't
permit equal treatment of all platforms, free platforms will get
prefered treatment.  For example, Emacs 21.x was released with a
display engine that could not support images and toolbars under
Windows and MacOSX, but did so under X11.  It was simply not possible
to get all platforms done in time.  This situation has been amended
since then: the respective ports are up to par, and this is a good
thing.  Though not as important as that the X11 and GTK ports are up
to par.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum