emacs-devel
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

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




reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]