Re: Android port of Emacs

[Po Lu]

Dmitry Gutov <dmitry@gutov.dev> writes:

> Ah, so you are worried about maintaining a separate project infrastructure.
>
> Personally, I really recommend you try
> Gitlab/Github/SourceHut/Gogs/etc. If you can bear with using any of
> those, I'm almost certain that you will receive more and better bug
> reports through those, and maybe even additional
> contributors/maintainers.

The repository or issue tracker infrastructure is not really the
problem, having to observe a separate bug report address (and direct
unrelated bugs back to bug-gnu-emacs) is.  There's also the problem of
managing the copyright assignment paperwork: I don't have access to
copyright.list, so anyone who wants to work on the Android port will
have to go back and forth between me and emacs-devel, which adds
difficulty as well.

Those are just a few of the problems.

> But either way, like others said, developing the Android port in a
> separate branch -- or even in a separate repo -- doesn't necessarily
> preclude you from having access to Debbugs, ftp.gnu.org, and even the
> Emacs mailing lists. I'm sure most or all of those can be arranged.

[...]

> Some larger time period could give more data, but so far it sounds
> like both conclusions can work relatively easily then: keeping Android
> port internally wouldn't result in too many additional conflicts for
> others to excise. But keeping it in external repo (or branch)
> shouldn't results in frequent conflicts either. And as a bonus, you
> don't have to use the same file for NEWS, so those 3-4 conflicts you
> mention would be avoided.

There's also a certain mental burden associated with maintaining a
separate project, which I'm not comfortable with.  The same goes for the
notion of starting what is essentially a fork of Emacs: we've seen the
waste of resources that was XEmacs and is now the spin-off Carbon Emacs.