Re: [Fabrice Popineau] Re: Need some bug/version info

Ralf Angeli <[email protected]> writes:

> * David Kastrup (2005-02-05) writes:
>
> [Forwarded to [email protected]]
>
>> From: Fabrice Popineau <[email protected]>
>> Subject: Re: Need some bug/version info
>> To: David Kastrup <[email protected]>
>> Cc: Ralf Angeli <[email protected]>
>> Date: Sat, 05 Feb 2005 12:26:42 +0100
>>
>> I don't think what Uwe reported is in connection with shy groups,
>> because:
>> - I can observe the same effect of bad fontification
>> - I use 21.5 which does not have the shy groups bug (or there is more
>> than one !)
>
> I don't know which message from Uwe you are referring to but it seems
> that my message containing both a rant about XEmacs' font-lock.el and
> the report of the crash related to shy groups created some confusion.
> Next time I'll better separate these things.
>
> Okay, I dug a bit in XEmacs' font-lock.el and tried to sort things out
> but I got stuck in code related to syntax tables.  I did all of the
> following with a freshly checked out and compiled XEmacs 21.5 and CVS
> AUCTeX (currently identical with AUCTeX 11.55).  Here is what I found
> so far:

[...]

> After that the syntactic pass should pick up the syntax properties
> and fontify the indicated regions.  This is done by the function
> `font-lock-fontify-syntactically-region'.  But this function does
> not seem to find the syntax properties.  It uses
> `parse-partial-sexp' and all sorts of checking on the resulting
> states which I don't understand.

It appears obvious that it has been a mistake of mine not to mention
in the release notes for AUCTeX that it generally appears to be a bad
idea to use XEmacs with AUCTeX if you can avoid it.

Alternatives are not much better.

a) Emacs-21 CVS.  Problem:  People have no guarantee to get a
working Emacs at first try.
b) Emacs-21.3.  Problem: on Windows and MacOS, no images, no toolbar,
older code base.  Even on X, not particularly nice when scrolling images.
c) XEmacs-21.4.  Problem: often ancient code base as compared to even
Emacs-21.3.
d) XEmacs-21.5.  Problem: moving target, often diverging code base.

Further XEmacs problems: on Windows we have both Cygwin as well as
Native to cater for, package system stuff and so on.

Uwe is doing the packaging part, but we really need a _developer_
actively involved with XEmacs development on our team if we hope to
ever get out of the quagmire of XEmacs problems.

So I am going to declare XEmacs "generally not recommended for AUCTeX
operation until further notice" starting with the next release.  That
does not mean that we don't try supporting it where we can, but it
will mean that if we fail (and we did fail for about 5 releases in a
row), we will not lose sleep over it.

As Stephen has repeatedly stated that he does not see enough interest
in AUCTeX from XEmacs users to warrant investing time in that area or
asking others to do so, there seems little point in trying to bend
over backwards for what nobody cares for, anyway.

I want Emacs 21.4.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum