Re: Updating idlwave in Emacs

[Glenn Morris <rgm@gnu.org>]

Hi,

There's no particular rush to get this done, so no worries.
But it's great that we can at least get discussion started.

JD Smith wrote:

> What I see as the best long term solution is to remove IDLWAVE from
> Emacs core, and bundle it as a package, but I don't have any
> experience with packages (other than as a user).

I don't really have any experience with packages either.
I don't think it's too difficult though.
Hopefully other people on this list can advise as needed.

If you mean that you'd like it moved from "core" Emacs to elpa.gnu.org,
that's come up in the context of a few other things recently. There
isn't a mechanism in place for it yet. The minimum would probably be to
obsolete the version in Emacs, with a note that newer versions will live
in elpa. Whether or not preserving the VCS history is possible/worth it
is still a bit of an open question.

See recent discussion in thread
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2014-07/msg00068.html

> I am also somewhat daunted by the need to backport changes from the
> Emacs core version of idlwave which have accumulated over the past 6
> or so years.

I'm afraid I don't have any tips to make merging the two versions any
easier (take the diff from the last known merged version and try to
apply it...). Quickly scanning the last couple of years of changes to
idlwave.el in Emacs doesn't seem to show any complex changes (though
some of them might be pervasive) so perhaps it won't be quite so bad...

Although it's the more difficult job, maybe that's the place to start -
make the definitive, merged version, then figure out where it will live?