From: Adrian Robert <arobert@cogsci.ucsd.edu>
Subject: Request: new emacs release
Date: Tue, 30 Mar 2004 14:47:51 -0500 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20F8AA5D-8283-11D8-93F5-003065907892@cogsci.ucsd.edu> (raw)
Hi all,
I am sorry to bother the developer list if this is not felt
appropriate, but I just wanted a user's perspective (not sure how
typical) to be heard..
I am a long-time emacs user frustrated with the current state and
worried from the tone of developer discussions here that no release
will be coming for a long time. I'm listing my personal list of
reasons for wanting a new release, FWIW, and not with any intention of
bashing, just in the spirit of giving feedback from a user
perspective..
1) Mac OS X
Due to various maintainership incidents, the only option for Panther
users to obtain a working, non-ancient aqua emacs is to compile the CVS
"21.3.50" from source. However due to no release plans being made,
this is a hit-or-miss affair -- bugs I've observed in recent attempts
include font-lock "regexp" colorizing not being performed, startup
failure due to lisp load errors, difficulties getting third-party
packages to run smoothly, and frequent (1+ per day) crashes. Even the
binary packages available on the net, which tend to be from better CVS
snapshots, still exhibit crashing and other bugs.
XEmacs is not really an option because it only works on OS X under X11
(and therefore uses ugly font rendering, etc.).
I know there is opposition to making OS X much of a priority in the
FSF, and I personally wish Apple would lend a hand in some way, but I
thought it was at least decided to provide a version. Right now this
only exists in CVS.
2) Fringe customization
For 4 years now, users wishing to use emacs 21 have had to live with
the unsuppressable super-wide double-fringe that came with that
version. Many times this makes the difference between showing two
windows size-by-side in a reasonably-sized font and not, and it takes
real estate from other windows in all cases. Many others have
complained about this.
"21.3.50" makes it configurable. (This was promised for 21.3 and
didn't make it in.) Furthermore it updates the buffer window behavior
to NOT take up an extra line after every 80 column line, using the
fringe to mark this instead. This is a bigger deal for people who edit
code than it may seem. I've tried compiling a CVS emacs to get the
21.3.50 behavior, but see above on my luck with hitting CVS on a good
day..
3) Time passage
It has been 1 year since 21.3. Aside from the major improvements (Mac
OS X support and fringe customizability) mentioned above, there must
have been many other worthwhile things done in this time -- it would be
nice to have them in a release. Also, the cleaning out of bugs that
comes with making a release might improve general development
efficiency (know there are differing opinions on this)..
best regards,
Adrian Robert
next reply other threads:[~2004-03-30 19:47 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 7+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2004-03-30 19:47 Adrian Robert [this message]
2004-03-30 23:52 ` Request: new emacs release Stefan Monnier
2004-03-31 7:49 ` Juanma Barranquero
2004-03-31 9:03 ` Piet van Oostrum
[not found] <20040331080125.BA47465A7E@imf.math.ku.dk>
2004-03-31 10:43 ` Lars Hansen
2004-03-31 10:50 ` Juanma Barranquero
2004-03-31 11:07 ` Lars Hansen
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