Re: Fatal error (11). Emacs/ Linux hosed my very long document.

[Brian Palmer]

Tim McNamara <timmcn@bitstream.net> writes:

> mikecoxlinux@yahoo.com (Mike Cox) writes:
>
>> I recently switched to xemacs as my default word processor so I
>> could do formatting in TEX for a very long document.  Most recently
>> I've been using Microsoft Word, the latest version.  I switched
>> because I thought that emacs had perfect stability and no crashes.
>> My perception was formed due to the constant FSF/GPL/Linux advocacy
>> promoted on slashdot and all the comp newsgroups.
>
> As a couple of minor quibbles:
>
> 1.  XEmacs is not Emacs, and XEmacs is not GNU or FSF software.
>     XEmacs and Emacs are not interchangeable.

The FSF is the single largest copyright holder in Xemacs.  

Quoting from the faq that is distributed with emacs (not the one in
xemacs, that I can tell, which might mean something -- or might not):

    File: efaq,  Node: Difference between Emacs and XEmacs,  Next: Emacs for 
MS-DOS,  Prev: Current GNU
distributions,  Up: Finding Emacs and related packages

    What is the difference between Emacs and XEmacs (formerly "Lucid Emacs")?
    =========================================================================

    First of all, they're both GNU Emacs.  XEmacs is just as much a later
    version of GNU Emacs as the FSF-distributed version.  This FAQ refers to
    the latest version to be distributed by the FSF as "Emacs," partly
    because the XEmacs maintainers now refer to their product using the
    "XEmacs" name, and partly because there isn't any accurate way to
    differentiate between the two without getting mired in paragraphs of
    legalese and history.

Yes, this means that there is no good way to distinguish between the
two dominant emacs-variants. For various reasons, some people seem to
get annoyed when you use fsfemacs to indicate the one being
distributed by the FSF , which would otherwise be my preference when I
need to distinguish between emacs and xemacs. 

And, yes, this sucks. The fork was not without its costs.