Re: existing work on TODO items

[Dave Love]

Ken Manheimer <address@hidden> writes:

> i do believe allout is used by at least a few people besides me

I meant used in the development version.  (I assume you weren't running
that version, given the use-before-definition error that broke it.)

> i don't understand what you mean by "the general facility in TODO".

** Implement a variant of uncompress.el or jka-compr.el that works with
  GNU Privacy Guard for encryption.  [Code exists but isn't assigned.
  See the Gnus development sources for assigned code concerning GPG
  use with mail, which is probably a good start.]  See also
  http://www.loveshack.ukfsn.org/emacs/auto-crypt.tgz.

> for what it's worth, i was submitting my updates not aware of the
> situation.

I'm probably little the wiser myself.  I was just surprised it had
been installed like that.  I didn't mean to put down contributions.

> for testing, i duplicated this outline changing the
> bullets to outline.el's pure-asterisks, and compared some operations
> with a time-trial function that i use.

[For what it's worth, I did benchmark.el for timing, including
separate GC time.]

> even without the time-trial, the most striking thing is that typing in
> an uncollapsed area of an large outline that otherwise has a lot of
> collapsed (hidden) topics is intolerably painful in the outline-mode
> buffer.

Overlays slow down editing, but collapsing all the leaves in NEWS, for
instance, and typing at the top is usable for me on a 500MHz SPARC; I
did Emacs 21 development on a P100 (though NEWS was a more reasonable
size then).  I'll let maintainers worry about the example, but there
were good reasons for making the old selective-display obsolete.  If
anything, this helps make my point about features not being
generalized and addressing the real issues.  If the current main
outlining mode isn't usable, I'd say it ought to be fixed.