[Savannah-hackers] Re: XEmacs Lisp Interface to MySQL Client C

[bv-savannah]

Hi Mathieu,

Mathieu Roy writes:
 > Hi,
 > 
 > Your project is very interesting -and interest me personnally.
 > 
 > Savannah is a hosting facility provided by the Free Software
 > Foundation.
 > GNU Emacs is one of the top projects of the Free Software Foundation.

Sure, I know.  I'm an outsider, but I get the gist of some of X vs GNU
emacs politics.

 > So we would like you to support also GNU Emacs. Is it possible?

I'm not sure.  Besides being the flavor I prefer, the reason why I
targeted XEmacs was because it had a mechanism to dynamically link in
a shared library (so called "emodule")

Does GNU Emacs have a similar facility?  I was under the impression it
doesn't and I don't immediately find any reference to such a feature
in the docs.

However, trading dynamic loading for the direct compiling/linking into
the GNU emacs executable there may still be the problem of how C code
is integrated into the 2 flavors.  I originally tried to adapt:

     http://world.std.com/~slanning/emacs/vmysql/

into an XEmacs "emodule", but found it was sufficiently different that
I was better off starting anew.  This "vmysql" code is meant to be
compiled into GNU emacs and might be a good starting point for a GNU
Emacs version.  It does some things with vectors which I don't quite
understand (a secondary reason for starting fresh).

 > (We host different elisp mode here that can be used with the two
 > emacs, as tramp)

I'll look at this.  Is tramp also a C module?

I'm no expert in either emacsen internals, but my guess is the best we
can hope for is 2 wrappers, each with the same lisp API.  This would,
at least, allow elisp hackers to build consistent packages for both
flavors.  A good thing, I think.

Even better would be a generic (ODBC? Perl DBI-like?) elisp API that
would let one have a choice of DB backends.  This could be at the lisp
or the C level.  But, I'm definitely not up for the endeavor.

I don't know if I am even up to supporting both X *and* GNU emacs in
this way, but I would really like to see it happen.  See, what I
*really* want is for something like this to be ubiquitous and then get
support in the VM mail reader for MySQL folders!  That is my real
goal.

 > Could you resubmit with statements about it?
 > You can resubmit your project with ease by copying
 > the big re-registration URL provided in the mail
 > you receive at submission

Let me look into GNU emacs internals and see what would be involved.

However, I warn you that I will be moving soon, so don't expect much
from me for a while.

Regards,
-Brett.