Re: Emacs on OS X development

[YAMAMOTO Mitsuharu]

>>>>> On Sun, 15 Jul 2012 08:54:48 +0800, Chong Yidong <address@hidden> said:

> Here's the historical context.  Way back during the Emacs 23
> development cycle, the Carbon port was completely broken; it could
> not even compile.  It remained so for a period of (IIRC) almost a
> year, because Yamamoto Mitsuharu was at the time unwilling to keep
> it up to date with the changes to the terminal and font systems, and
> apparently no one else could fix it.  Since the Cocoa port was in
> the process of being merged, it was then decided that rather than
> keep two Mac ports---one of them broken for the indefinite
> future---we'd just go with Cocoa and work on improving it.

I stopped supporting the Carbon port for Emacs 23 in the early stage
because Apple announced GUI via Carbon was not going to 64-bit.  I'm
confident that was the right decision, though there were some
complaints at that time.

> Since then, of course, Yamamoto Mitsuharu has been able to keep the
> Carbon port alive.

That sounds inaccurate.  I didn't keep the "Carbon port" alive.
Instead, I assigned my resource toward another port (the
"Carbon+AppKit" port, the direct predecessor of the Mac port) on Emacs
22, by replacing the GUI-specific part of the Carbon port so it uses
Cocoa Appkit rather than Carbon HIToolbox, reusing the remaining part
of the code.  I was sticking to Emacs 22 rather than 23 first, because
I wanted to concentrate on the switch of GUI implementation basis
only, without being bothered with the difference between versions.  Of
course, I wasn't sure if such an attempt would succeed when I started
it.  The very first internal version started to work in one or two
months, but it took another year to make it public, and yet another
year to stabilize it.

                                     YAMAMOTO Mitsuharu
                                address@hidden