Re: [AUCTeX-devel] Contributing to AUCTeX

[Marcin Borkowski]

On 2015-11-07, at 21:21, Mosè Giordano <address@hidden> wrote:

> Hi Marcin,
>
> 2015-11-07 20:14 GMT+01:00 Marcin Borkowski <address@hidden>:
>> OK,
>>
>> so after some time dedicated to thinking I signed the FSF papers and
>> sent them (of course, it will take some time for the letter to get
>> across the pond, and FSF will probably need at least a few days to
>> register it).
>
> Good to hear you'll join us :-)  Just out of curiosity, you signed the
> papers for AUCTeX or Emacs?  In the former case you can contribute

Both.

>> So, my question now is: what do I do in order to start contributing to
>> AUCTeX?  Currently, I put my code in this GitHub repository:
>> https://github.com/mbork/tex-plus.el , but of course this doesn't have
>> to be so.
>
> I checked it out briefly.  A couple of comments.  First, I saw you
> require cl-lib, but try and avoid loading it at runtime, instead it's
> ok to use cl macros that would be compiled.  Second, I saw some

OK.  Indeed, I only use a handful of macros from cl-lib.

> LaTeX3-related code, I'm looking forward to seeing its support in
> AUCTeX improved!

Well, not really: I'm just making it an option to treat : and _
"letters".  (Support for LaTeX3 is an option, but in the future...)

>> Of course, there are questions of quality, reviews, tests etc.  What are
>> the practices for AUCTeX?
>
> Clone AUCTeX git repo
>
>     $ git clone git://git.sv.gnu.org/auctex.git
>
> start hacking, when a feature is ready write the ChangeLog entry: for
> every function/variable/etc changed move the point in Emacs inside
> their definitions and issue C-x 4 a, which will prepare for you a
> ChangeLog entry to be filled with the description of the change.
> Then, when also the ChangeLog is ready you can commit the change.  For
> the commit message follow these rules:
>
> * first line should be a short summary of the change, possibly shorter
> than 50 characters or so
> * the body of the message are simply the ChangeLog entries you wrote.
>
> Take a look at past commit messages
> (http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=auctex.git).  Please, before
> committing your change, make sure you're working on the most recent
> version.  AUCTeX has a relatively low traffic development, so it won't
> be difficult to keep the repo updated.  This will avoid us to fix
> merge conflicts (above all in ChangeLog[1]).   Now you can create a
> patch with `format-patch', for example
>
>     $ git format-patch -1
>
> (see `man git-format-patch' for more information about its syntax).
> Then attach the patch to a mail for address@hidden, someone will
> review your patch and hopefully apply it ;-)

OK.

>> I hope that my code isn't bad enough to be
>> rejected (though admiteddly its far from being ideal, and probably will
>> never be, since (1) I'm not (yet?) a bearded Elisp wizard, and (2) when
>> dealing with LaTeX I have to make some assumptions e.g. about the user
>> not changing catcodes like crazy).
>
> Well, the assumption about not changing catcodes is necessary for
> AUCTeX to work.  And also most of conditionals are a serious problem
> (we can deal with conditionals that check the compiler used, but I
> can't think of many other situations), so assuming there are no
> conditional is often fine.

Of course.  I guess there may be more assumptions like that.  For
instance, no \bgroup...\egroup (or even worse, \bgroup...}, which is
fine for TeX!)

>> Also, while I don't have too much time now (my teaching schedule this
>> semester is totally insane), I manage to carve out a few hours of Elisp
>> coding each week, so while I might not answer all emails within 24
>> hours, I /will/ answer them eventually.
>
> Don't worry.

Thanks!

> Bye,
> Mosè
>
> Note
> [1] BTW, how about dropping it and auto-generating it like Emacs?

Best,

-- 
Marcin Borkowski
http://octd.wmi.amu.edu.pl/en/Marcin_Borkowski
Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science
Adam Mickiewicz University