Re: lua mode

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

tomas@tuxteam.de (Tomas Zerolo) writes:

> I'm an user of Lua mode, written by Christian Vogler et
> al. Yesterday I contacted him, asking what he thinks about
> integrating it into the Emacs distribution.
>
> He kindly answered that he would be fine with that but then would
> have to hand off maintenance due to lack of time. So I offered to do
> the footwork (meaning he did the hard work and I make now the noise
> ;-)
>
> Christian is OK signing papers, I'd have to approach the other
> authors bfore anything goes (I'd have to sign papers as well).
>
> Now I haven't maintained any Emacs package up to now, so I would
> very much appreciate your guidance, if this thing happens.
>
> One thing Christian wishes is that the package continues to work
> well with XEmacs. Thus I might need special guidance with those of
> you experienced in maintenance of such dual packages.

You have to be aware that the package in the CVS will be distributed
as part of Emacs, and thus it has to be under the GPL, and every
contributor needs to have his copyright assigned to the FSF.  XEmacs
development headquarters in general does not bother about assignments
too much.  That means that if you have XEmacs-only contributors, they
can't work even on the XEmacs parts of LUA-mode without assigning
copyright to the FSF, and some XEmacs contributors/developers would
rather refrain than do that (some prefer XEmacs for exactly that
reason).  So that's the downpoint.

With regard to XEmacs support: the current maintainer of the mode (in
this case, you) decides about the policies.  That would mean it would
be basically your responsibility to make reasonably sure the stuff
continues working under XEmacs in case other Emacs developers make
additions and fixes.  If you pass on maintainership at some point of
time, finding an XEmacs-aware successor might be more difficult with
the mode being maintained as part of Emacs.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum