On Savannah: What are "arch" and "bidi" and ....

On Savannah: What are "arch" and "bidi" and ....

[Alan Mackenzie]

At the risk of appearing stupid, would somebody please tell me the
purpose of the various named branches in the Emacs CVS repository.  I've
been seeing these names bandied about on the emacs-devel mailing list for
months, and haven't had the courage to ask before now.

I mean, one would have thought that the arch branch was a part of tree,
sweeping elegantly upwards from low down on the trunk, perhaps covering a
neighbouring path with luscious leaves, sheltering from the rain those
standing under it.

And I always thought a bidi was a low sink one sat in to, well, wash
something or other in.

Is "arch" short for "architecture" or "archive" or something else?

"RC" is often used to identify a large and powerful Christian sect.

So, what are the "arch", "bidi", "lexical", "multi-tty", "RC", (Miles's)
"tiling", "Unicode" branches for?  Is there anywhere on savannah I could
have looked to find the answer myself?

Thanks in advance for the answers!

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Munich, Germany)
Email: aacm@muuc.dee; to decode, wherever there is a repeated letter
(like "aa"), remove half of them (leaving, say, "a").

Re: On Savannah: What are "arch" and "bidi" and ....

[Gernot Hassenpflug]

>>>>> "Alan" == Alan Mackenzie <Alan> writes:

    Alan> At the risk of appearing stupid, would somebody please tell
    Alan> me the purpose of the various named branches in the Emacs
    Alan> CVS repository.  /../

    bidi = support for bi-directional display and input, as in Arabic,
    Hebrew, etc. (Could we get "todo" there too, i.e. support for top
    to bottom writing as in Japanese and Chinese? - just kidding)

-- 
G Hassenpflug RASC, Kyoto University

Re: On Savannah: What are "arch" and "bidi" and ....

[Kevin Rodgers]

Alan Mackenzie wrote:
 > At the risk of appearing stupid, would somebody please tell me the
 > purpose of the various named branches in the Emacs CVS repository.  I've
 > been seeing these names bandied about on the emacs-devel mailing list for
 > months, and haven't had the courage to ask before now.

You should ask on the emacs-devel mailing list then.

...

 > So, what are the "arch", "bidi", "lexical", "multi-tty", "RC", (Miles's)
 > "tiling", "Unicode" branches for?  Is there anywhere on savannah I could
 > have looked to find the answer myself?

arch is a new version control system, aka tla.  I don't understand the
relationship between CVS and arch, though.

bidi is the branch that supports bidirectional text, i.e. right-to-left
languages as well as left-to-right.

lexical is the branch that implements Emacs Lisp with lexical
(vs. dynamic) binding.

multi-tty is the branch that supports, uh, multiple ttys (for a single
emacs instance).

tiling is the branch that implements some fancy image features, like
background images.

unicode is obviously the branch that (fully) support Unicode -- it might
even use it as the internal encoding.

-- 
Kevin Rodgers

Re: On Savannah: What are "arch" and "bidi" and ....

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Alan Mackenzie<none@example.invalid>
> Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help
> Date: Fri, 7 May 2004 08:11:01 +0000
> 
> At the risk of appearing stupid, would somebody please tell me the
> purpose of the various named branches in the Emacs CVS repository.

Is gnu.emacs.help really a good place to ask such questions?

Re: On Savannah: What are "arch" and "bidi" and ....

[Alan Mackenzie]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote on Fri, 07 May 2004 18:31:19 +0200:
>> From: Alan Mackenzie<none@example.invalid>
>> Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help
>> Date: Fri, 7 May 2004 08:11:01 +0000
 
>> At the risk of appearing stupid, would somebody please tell me the
>> purpose of the various named branches in the Emacs CVS repository.

> Is gnu.emacs.help really a good place to ask such questions?

Maybe, maybe not.  There might be other people around g.e.h. curious
about the matter.  For certain, some of the best people (such as yourself
and Kevin) hang around here, so answers were forthcoming.

Maybe emacs-devel itself would have been better.

Ah, well.  Have a good weekend!

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Munich, Germany)
Email: aacm@muuc.dee; to decode, wherever there is a repeated letter
(like "aa"), remove half of them (leaving, say, "a").

Re: On Savannah: What are "arch" and "bidi" and ....

[Miles Bader]

Gernot Hassenpflug <gh@nospam.com> writes:
>     bidi = support for bi-directional display and input, as in Arabic,
>     Hebrew, etc. (Could we get "todo" there too, i.e. support for top
>     to bottom writing as in Japanese and Chinese? - just kidding)

Actually I downloaded a hack from somewhere that supported this (a long
time ago though, I don't know where it is).  It wasn't all that useful I
suppose, but I thought it was kewl... :-)

-Miles
-- 
Is it true that nothing can be known?  If so how do we know this?  -Woody Allen

Re: On Savannah: What are "arch" and "bidi" and ....

[Miles Bader]

Kevin Rodgers <ihs_4664@yahoo.com> writes:
> arch is a new version control system, aka tla.  I don't understand the
> relationship between CVS and arch, though.

I maintain several arch emacs branches, and some of them are frequently
synchronized with corresponding branches in the emacs CVS tree:

    emacs--cvs-trunk--0         => The normal CVS trunk
    emacs--unicode--0           => The `emacs-unicode-2' branch, which
                                                  will likely become Emacs 22

So it's quite reasonable for someone that wants to track emacs CVS to
use the corresponding arch branch instead, if that's more convenient.

> lexical is the branch that implements Emacs Lisp with lexical
> (vs. dynamic) binding.

BTW, this branch is actually called `lexbind'.

-Miles
-- 
"I distrust a research person who is always obviously busy on a task."
   --Robert Frosch, VP, GM Research

Re: On Savannah: What are "arch" and "bidi" and ....

[Stefan Monnier]

> unicode is obviously the branch that (fully) support Unicode -- it might
> even use it as the internal encoding.

Maybe it's obvious but it's not quite true.  The current CVS trunk support
Unicode fairly well (if you turn on utf-translate-cjk-mode) and the unicode
branch does not support unicode "fully" since it doesn't support bidi and
many other unicode thingies like that.

The unicode branch is the branch that changes the internal text
representation to one derived from utf-8, in order to make it easier to
improve the unicode support.  And yes, it does support unicode better.


        Stefan