Re: Android port of Emacs

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Sat, 24 Jun 2023 22:25:48 -0400
> 
>   >   (Someone
>   > brought up redisplay and bidi as such examples, but that's false:
>   > those are well documented in Emacs and the requisite external
>   > knowledge is in standard documents that can be studied and understood
>   > with reasonably small effort.  For example, if bidi.c loses its sole
>   > maintainer, someone could study the UBA in UAX#9 and reimplement it
>   > from scratch, using the large commentaries in bidi.c and xdisp.c as
>   > guidance.)
> 
> Could development of the Android port include writing documentation
> of the same thoroughness and quality for that code?

The main domain-specific knowledge for that port is how Android
systems are organized and work, and how application installation works
on those systems.  Such documentation cannot be usefully part of
Emacs, and the parts of it that can and should be in Emacs will have
to play the constant catchup game with the changes and developments in
the Android OS and environment, something that from my personal
experience with an Android-based smartphone changes a lot and at a
very fast pace.  And it doesn't help that the most crucial information
we need for making Emacs a reasonably well-behaved app on Android is
on the border of undocumented (if not over the border), as Android
AFAIU is not meant to be the host of such programs.

So I very much doubt that this particular aspect can be resolved
anywhere near completeness by having its documentation in Emacs, let
alone keeping that up-to-date to facilitate future development and
maintenance.