Re: address@hidden: Redisplay bug in latest CVS]

[Gerd Moellmann]

"Eli Zaretskii" <address@hidden> writes:

> > From: address@hidden
> > Date: 15 May 2002 15:50:45 +0200
> > 
> > The Emacs/Guile plan has moved Emacs to the low end of my personal
> > priority list.  I'll queue reports, but it's currently unlikely that
> > I'll work on them.
> 
> If moving to Guile means we lose Gerd's help, then I'm against moving
> to Guile as a matter of practice.

I see that what I wrote can be misunderstood, for example as simply
being opposed to Scheme or Guile as a matter of principle.  So please
let me clarify.

There are technical reasons for being against a reimplementation of
ELisp in Guile, or for making Guile Emacs' principal extension
language.  These issues can theoretically be solved with enough
effort.  I personally think there's too much effort and risk involved;
others might find that debatable or irrelevant in the bigger GNU
picture.  I also don't like the way this crept up again, but this is a
completely different story which I won't belabor here.  Anyway,
although I'm against such a move, the reason Emacs has lost priority
for me _today_ is this, in short:

The "new" redisplay is anything but new for me.  Today, working on it
is for me a mixture of incredibly boring and inherently and constantly
complex that makes it essentially a pain in the neck.  That's not a
good motivation, of course, and it's getting worse.

In the past, it helped me to find something else in Emacs to work on,
and do a bit there, a bit in redisplay etc.  Lately, the only "else"
part remaining that might have interested me enough was the ELisp
interpreter.  But work there doesn't make sense when the ELisp
implementation is anyway replaced, and something else becomes the
primary extension language.  (What makes sense is working on Guile
instead (not saying that I'll do that.))

(I've been looking for other projects that might play that role, but
there's currently nothing.)

So, no motivation => low priority.