Re: Mac OS-compatible ports

[chad <yandros@gmail.com>]

On Dec 31, 2011, at 10:26 PM, Leo wrote:

> On 2011-12-31 21:22 +0800, Ted Zlatanov wrote:
>> I agree with your statement, but we're not "pushing" the NS port only
>> because it's for GNUstep.  It's quite usable on Mac OS X.
> 
> I wonder how you reach that conclusion. If you don't use Emacs heavily
> on a Mac, then you don't know if it is quite usable. My experience is
> that it is not.

I use it every day, and wrote upwards of 100k words of (jargon-heavy) english text with it last year, using flyspell and org.  I think it might have crashed a few times during 2011, but I'm not certain.  I typically rebuild the tip of the repository every few days, sometimes waiting as long as a couple weeks, so I don't run months-old instances of emacs.

> My impression is that Mac-Port is a piece of solid well-engineered software. 

That was also my impression of the mac port, except that it is also out-of-date with respect to emacs, it is becoming more out of date over time, and it contributes to the continued future of emacs only tangentially (as changes are slowly migrated into the core emacs tree).

As I said before, I am very glad that the mac port exists and provides some users with a solid emacs implementation that doesn't lack features that they need, but it does not meet those criteria for me.  Even ignoring GNUstep, all indications suggest that that situation will only worsen over time (multi-tty, org, cedet, bidi, lexbind, xembed, etc).  Until someone comes up with an actual proposal to remedy these problems, the cries like ``we should be using the Mac port instead of the NS port'' seem very much like ``after you guys build us a new bike shed, you need to make sure that you paint it the right color.''

*Chad