Re: Strange change in bytecmop.el

[Juanma Barranquero <lekktu@gmail.com>]

On 7/25/05, David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> wrote:

> Sure.  As long as we have code intended to run with XEmacs, calling it
> anything but code intended to run with XEmacs would be obfuscate.
> 
> The only way around that would be to completely remove all such code.
> This does not make sense except where code has fallen out of active
> maintenance and nobody knows whether it is working, anyway.

IMHO, maintaining "(if (boundp 'xemacs)..)" in Emacs code makes sense
when the package affected has a life *outside* Emacs and XEmacs
distributions. For those packages that only live in Emacs and XEmacs
source trees, there are already lots of site-specific changes, and
frankly, for us Emacs maintainers the "(boundp 'xemacs)" bit brings no
benefit: we're not going to sync with XEmacs code because of legal
issues, and it's more code to maintain or at least to consciously
ignore when fixing an issue or otherwise modifying the package.

However, supporting "(boundp 'emacs)" would make sense. I don't think
we're in the business of telling outside elisp developers whether they
should consider Emacs or XEmacs the "main line". If a guy uses XEmacs
and develops a package for it, and he's nice enough to make allowances
for it to work on Emacs, it's a bit absurd to ask him to consider
Emacs the main line and put XEmacs code inside guards. Supporting the
'emacs feature is not a big deal, but it is certainly nicer to
non-Emacs developers (at least long term).

-- 
                    /L/e/k/t/u