Re: [AUCTeX-devel] support for xemacs

[Mosè Giordano]

Hi Uwe,

2017-02-23 11:32 GMT+01:00 Uwe Brauer <address@hidden>:
> There is no way to talk you that out? I mean why do you want to remove
> the compatibility code for the 12+branch? You could just *explicitly*
> state that Xemacs compatibility is not guaranteed anymore and the user
> could still try to compile auctex and use it at the *own* risk. The user
> base is small anyhow.

We have tons of cruft in AUCTeX, sometimes you can find compatibility
functions for Emacs 19, which is almost as old as AUCTeX (and it's
*old*).  The only reason to keep legacy code in a program is to
support old platforms, in case there are users still running them: do
you know whether there are people running XEmacs willing to use the
latest release of AUCTeX?  Version 11.90 has some incompatibilities
with XEmacs, yet no one apart from Keita noticed it (but I didn't get
whether he currently uses XEmacs or fires it just for tests).  If
someone is still using XEmacs 21.4 probably isn't really interested in
bleeding edge software and can live with a dead AUCTeX.

Having two separate branches would allow us to develop more freely
master branch by using more modern functions.  Just think of regexp
classes, not supported in XEmacs... It's a pain to pay attention to
something that will most probably not used by (almost?) anybody, it
drains time from developers to no avail.

Bye,
Mosè