SiteMap Search ElispArea HowTo Glossary RecentChanges News Problems Suggestions

XEmacsDesiderata

XEmacs Desiderata by Stephen Turnbull

This isn’t a release plan, and may never become one. But then again, it may. XEmacs releases being what they are, a firm statement one way or the other is unlikely to be of much benefit. Ambiguity, however, can.

About the wikilink and title: I don’t know what’s right, but I sure do have strong opinions. I think it’s best if this kind of page has one lead editor … for this one, moi. :-P I hope the wikilink and title encourage competing pages with similar naming so they’re easy to find. And add a link in the Better Ideas section below.

About the structure of this page: It’s already getting too long. I plan to prioritize in each section, and move all but the “hot half-dozen” (or so) into pages named something like XEmacsDesiderataOtherFeatures, and so on. The fontconfig bullet under Features is about as long as I’m willing to admit, and it will probably be reduced to one or two sentences and a wikilink in the near future. (Cf. the megapatch bullet under Process improvements.) Feel free to add stuff you’re interested in (that will draw my attention better than a page somewhere else), but it would be nice if you’d respect this structure. And of course if you want to make a federal case of something, you probably want to make a page elsewhere, because I may very well tuck it out of sight in some Other* category.

Of course, it’s a wiki and this is not my wiki home page, so you’re not constrained. But I think that’s a good plan, and hope you will agree. ;-)

Here are some things I would like to see in the next release of XEmacs (which will be version 22), in no particular order.

Features

Implementation details

Process improvements

Hi Stephen. Have you ever heard of BugEverywhere? It is a bug tracking over a distributed SCM (namely Arch or Bazaar-NG) – Jérôme Marant

  • Improved main repository. I’ve long been of the opinion that we need to move on from CVS, but the main candidates were Bitkeeper (too risky—several of us have participated directly in VC development) and Subversion (can a “better CVS” possibly be “good enough”?) Bitkeeper has gone on to rule itself out through Larry McVoy’s tantrum (sorry, Larry, I still respect you, but that was a serious mistake). Subversion, on the other hand, has won a lot of fans, and at worst a conversion would be low risk but buy us only a little better service.
  • Reduce the megapatch problem. Ben Wing is famous for submitting huge patches that affect half the files in XEmacs, causing conflicts on updates in everybody else’s workspaces, but it’s more than that. We need distributed advanced revision control systems that deal with conflicts in an intelligent way. Neither CVS nor Subversion does (not yet, and not soon). On the other hand, the “advanced systems” don’t really seem ready yet. I’m hoping that a combination of CVS or Subversion as the central repository plus Arch, Darcs, whatever handling branches will help.

There is no rule #4

And there is no schedule, either. Not yet, and it may not be my job, anyway. ;-)

C'mon, there must be better ideas!

But there aren’t any yet! :-P


Back to StephenTurnbull’s home page.