[emacs-bidi] merge emacs-bidi into the main tree

[Alex Schroeder]

Hi all,

We've all been waiting for a bidi-capable Emacs for a year or longer,
now.  The existing emacs-bidi seems to work fine -- it just doesn't
modify the current display engine.  I recently even saw some Arabic
text in UTF-8 displayed correctly while using ERC (an IRC client for
Emacs) with emacs-bidi.

Instead of waiting further, I suggest we just take what we have.
It may be slow, cumbersome, still have tricky bugs in it -- but
having something is better than having nothing.

Whoever took the decision a long time ago to not use the approach
used in emacs-bidi should reconsider the decision.  We've been
waiting for a long time; I don't suppose that was foreseeable at the
time the decision was taken.  Given that we don't have any redisplay
hackers -- not to mention with enough free time -- I think the
current emacs-bidi approach is the best we will be able to come up
with in the year to come.  And I don't think we really want to wait
that long.  We'd rather take the imperfect solution.

Alex.
-- 
http://www.emacswiki.org/alex/
I was on holidays from 2003-07-01 to 2003-07-29
and have a lot of catching up to do.