Re: May your change "Factor out lists of operators specially treated by 'make-autoload'." be added to Emacs?

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>]

Samuel Bronson writes:
 > On Wed, Nov 16, 2011 at 2:19 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen@xemacs.org> wrote:
 > > Samuel Bronson writes:
 > >  > Dear Stephen,
 > >  >
 > >  > I recently became aware that the following change is not present in
 > >  > GNU Emacs. I would like to see this rectified.
 > >
 > > I assigned my XEmacs code to the FSF around 1998.  If the assignment
 > > is not on file, I have my copy around somewhere.
 > >
 > > Note that the code that this patch patches was written by Ben Wing in
 > > 2005 (Mercurial r2548).
 > 
 > While it's true that the patch won't quite apply cleanly, the
 > `make-autoload' functions appear to actually have the same structure
 > (including comments). A human could easily apply it it, making the
 > necessary adjustments for differences in the actual contents of the
 > lists. (I guess Ben already assigned copyright to the FSF?)

No!  Ben hasn't assigned copyright as far as I know; you'd have to
check with the FSF copyright clerk or him, but although he's expressed
willingness to assign *all* of his code, he attached conditions that
never were satisfied.  I suspect he would assign small parts if he
were asked.

My code is entirely original (as far as replacing hard-coded data with
a variable reference can be considered "original" :-), and you're more
than welcome to the docstrings (although the GNU Emacs Docstring
Police will probably have something to say about style).

You'd have to ask a lawyer to be sure, but ISTM that there should be
no copyright problems if you insert my defvars (as permitted by GPL
and conforms to GNU Emacs policy by my assignment).  Then adjust the
contents to GNU Emacs reality and then go figure out where to use them
for yourself (your original contribution).  You only need an
assignment from Ben if you also copy surrounding code from XEmacs for
some reason.