Re: Bringing psgml back to life

[florian@fsavigny.de (Florian v. Savigny)]

Various contributors wrote: 

  > > Any damn programmer can write code a compiler can
  > > understand. It takes a good programmer to write code that any
  > > damn programmer can understand.

  > you may safely assume the lat[t]er.
  > IMO psgml-package counts as one of the most useful and most skilled so far.

Although I'm perhaps not really in a position to jugde, I agree that
psgml is an outstanding piece of code. It can (independently of
nsgmls) parse DTDs and SGML files, and correctly so, i.e. it
understands the logical structure of the document you are
editing. That alone, as far as I understand, is no small
achievement. (As far as I know, one of the reasons why XML was
invented was that it is such a headache to write an SGML parser.) I
certainly think that any damn programmer couldn't have written that.

It is against this backdrop that I assume that Lennart simply didn't
have the time to comment the code in a way that would have made it
easy to maintain even for tinkerers like me. Even so, he did write an
info file about the API, i.e. the kind of low-level functions that I
used to write my add-ons. (Sad I somehow didn't know that when I wrote
them, but found out about them by rummaging through the sources.)

  > I don't know what is the copyright status w.r.t other
  > contributors, but it would be worth checking it, to see if we can
  > put psgml in GNU ELPA.

I've just gone through the change log. Although it looks like Lennart
wrote about 99.9% of the code, he also lists five other people as
having contributed to it:

Dave Love  <fx@gnu.org>, <d.love@dl.ac.uk>
Yasushi Abe
Marc-Antoine Parent
David Megginson
Matthias Clasen	<mclasen@sun2.mathematik.uni-freiburg.de>, <clasen@pong.mathematik.uni-freiburg.de>

[the email addresses have probably been defunct for years, but
who knows]

and the following two as having made suggestions which prompted him to
change something:

Dirk Frömbgen
Mark Eichin

Is there any standard way to check the copyright status with respect
to people which might be difficult to contact? (I have no idea whether
the latter two are relevant in any way.)

Best regards,

Florian