Re: Emacs Mac port

[Bozhidar Batsov]

On 3 January 2016 at 07:13, YAMAMOTO Mitsuharu <address@hidden> wrote:

>>>>> On Sat, 02 Jan 2016 14:21:00 -0800, John Wiegley <address@hidden> said:
>> I'd rather like to avoid having/maintaining multiple versions of
>> the Mac port, because that doesn't look better than the present
>> situation. Currently I feel inclined to keep it separated from the
>> standard distribution.

> Unless I misunderstand, right now you are maintaining a patch. If we
> merge most of your work (though apparently not all), doesn't this
> just meant that the size of the patch you maintain becomes much
> smaller? I'd think that no matter what, this is a win for any fork
> maintainer.

The size of the patch is not an issue; actually, the Mac specific
files are currently distributed as raw files rather than in the patch
form.  Also, most of the port-independent part has already been
committed to the emacs-25 branch.

What exactly has been committed to the emacs-25 branch? I recall no major improvements to the cocoa port in Emacs 25.

 

Maintaining a single version is much simpler especially when it comes
to processing bug reports, reproducing them, and trying fix
candidates.

I'm not sure what would change if some of the functionality was moved to GNU Emacs. You still use it, as the basis for the Mac port and you always support just the latest version.

 

If there were no alternative for Mac-native GUI ports, or there is a
consensus that it is not good enough, then it would be meaningful to
have an FSF-policy compliant version as well as a full-feature version
despite the maintenance burden.  But that is not the case.

I don't think it is a good idea to have a restricted version of the
Mac port whereas the developer is not willing to provide it and most
of the current Mac port users would skip it preferring the
full-feature version.

                                     YAMAMOTO Mitsuharu
                                address@hidden