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Re: Emacs Mac port
From: |
Stefan Monnier |
Subject: |
Re: Emacs Mac port |
Date: |
Fri, 22 Mar 2019 14:11:44 -0400 |
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/27.0.50 (gnu/linux) |
> Thanks! I have a silly question: why are these improvements is a separate
> project instead of being in upstream? I've read the overview, and tried
> searching around a bit, but don't see.
Here was my explanation last time this came up (it was on reddit,
hidden within a discussion about Helm):
FWIW, the reason the mac port is separate has nothing to do with the
policy of not supporting features specific to proprietary code.
It's mostly a historical accident: when the old Carbon code for
"Emacs on Mac" had to be replaced, the only established option was
the "Emacs.app" port. Yamamoto's mac port was announced but not
really materialized yet, and the Emacs.app promised to also work on
GNUstep which was a great side benefit. So the Emacs.app code was
integrated. Since then the GNUstep promise has not really
materialized (tho it's been just usable enough to be able to fix
a handful of MacOS bugs, IIUC), and the Emacs.app (aka "cocoa") code
did not get much support (as a general rule, while Emacs has many
MacOS users, it seems very few of them are interested in
contributing to fix bugs and improve the code :-( ). I don't think
there'd be much resistance to switching the MacOS support code to
the one in the mac port (it might support MacOS-only features, but
so did the Emacs.app port: it's not a reason to reject it) if that
port was significantly better, but from what I hear the difference
is not large enough to motivate such a switch.
-- Stefan