Re: [AUCTeX-devel] Re: [comp.emacs.xemacs] AUCTeX 11.84 released

[David Kastrup]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <address@hidden> writes:

> Ralf Angeli writes:
>
>  > * Stephen J. Turnbull (2007-01-27) writes:
>  > 
>  > > However, if this is so annoying to you, there must be lots of
>  > > them.  I'm curious, why aren't those users coming to XEmacs?
>  > > Don't you tell them what the right place to report bugs is?  Or
>  > > what?
>  > 
>  > We usually tell them to upgrade.
>
> Hm.  Sounds to me like the process is working just about like *we*
> want it to.  They try the package version, they want something more,
> they ask for it, they get it.  Those who don't need more don't say
> anything, they just are happy.

Uh, the point of the package system is to make people happily accept
stagnation?  That's how you want the process to work?

Ignorance is bliss, sure.  But in my book, Emacs is not so much about
making people happy as it is about making them productive.

Feature set and feature completeness of Emacsen are so widely
incongruent that people just don't know what they could _expect_ from
Emacs: they make do with whatever magic happens to be available at a
given point of time.

The package system is reassuring people that they have the newest
version of software that is available (at one point of time, it was
pretty much impossible to figure out what upstream version a package
corresponded to.  Nowadays there is a way to ask using `i', but it
still is not displayed by default in the package manager).

And if they make do with what they honestly believe to be the current
state of affairs, that's what you consider a working process?

> I realize that doesn't meet *your* needs or expectations in any way.

Could you spell out in more detail what needs and expectations of
yours are met by providing old packages?

> I'll get in touch with Uwe and see what he wants to do/can do about
> updating or abandoning the XEmacs packaged version.

Reasonable.  It is my personal guess that the easiest way to get a
working AUCTeX package would be to scrap what is currently in the
XEmacs package tree, check in the files from the binary package we
provide upstream, in the right positions for an XEmacs package source
tree, and create control files from scratch that install them into the
right place in the sumo/package/whatever tree.

I'd guess this to be the most feasible way, in particular for someone
who has had extensive experience with XEmacs packages.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum