Re: [Texmacs-dev] Cocoa backend

[Henri Lesourd]

Massimiliano Gubinelli wrote:

> I hope to be able to  publish a Xcode project soon. However I feel  
> that some more work is needed before integration in CVS (and I'm not  
> quite proficient in that so if somebody offers some help I would be  
> glad, in any case I think Joris would like to review the code before  
> integrating it).
It is of course, great that you started this project. But other people
said this already, thus I will not repeat it too much :-).

Nevertheless, I would like to underline one point : the experience
of the native Windows port showed us that for specific technical
parts of TeXmacs like these, if the code becomes unmaintained
at some point, it is difficult to find a new maintainer, because
the project in itself is not sufficiently general : you need to find
one guy which is **in the same time** an OS-specific-things
hacker and a TeXmacs fan. That's hard to find.

On the other hand, if you look at the code of the Win32 native
port of TeXmacs (I don't know where it is right now, the .cpp
files seem to have vanished ;-(... ), you see that as a matter of
fact, most of the job is just reimplementing the X11 API on top
of Win32.

Thus, it seems to me that it would be a good idea to take care
of implementing things in such a way that the general-purpose,
reuseable part of your work (which is, as a matter of fact, 90%
of the work) could be extracted easily, and, why not, labelled
as a completely general-purpose project it itself : something
like : "implementing a lightweight X11 compatibility layer
on top of Cocoa, in such a way that (ultimately), one can
compile X11 code on the Mac without modification. Application
to the GNU TeXmacs Software".

If you proceed this way, of course your general-purpose
implementation of X11 will be incomplete, because
what you really want to do is porting TeXmacs on
the Mac. But nevertheless, doing things this way creates,
in my opinion, a project with a much wider appeal, and
strongly increases the chances that you can find help to
complete the implementation, maintainers for parts of the
code you don't want to maintain in the future, etc.

This being said, I will repeat that a little bit :-) : in any way,
it's great that you started this project ;-) !

Best, Henri