Re: XEmacs at a crossroads

Raymond Toy writes:

 > I never thought of it being a competition (at least not for many,
 > many years).

It's not primarily a race for the gold medal, no.

However, there's another sense of "compete", which is competition for
resources.  Mostly, that time spent using and working on anything else
is time not spent on XEmacs.  While I've never believed that number of
contributors is a deterministic increasing function of number of
users, it certainly doesn't hurt to have a lot of enthusiastic users.

Richard certainly recognizes that sense of "compete", and so do many
GNU Emacs contributors.  Richard has always discouraged GNU Emacs
developers from even looking at XEmacs code (for several reasons, the
most important of which is copyright paranoia), and actively solicited
our contributors and users to work on Emacs because "GNU's work is so
important" (he claims to believe that that would have no impact on
contributions to XEmacs, I'm an economist and know better).

On the other hand, part of what kept me going for years was the belief
that XEmacs was a better editor and closer to the users' needs than
Emacs, and that the XEmacs Project could be more responsive to
industrial users than Emacs was.  You could say that that's just a
project with different goals, not a competition, but I always kept an
eye on relative position to Emacs when allocating time. :-) I can't
speak for the other developers in general, but Steve Baur and Ben Wing
definitely were motivated to be "better than Emacs" at least in part.

 >     Stephen> 1.  Close up shop and release the resources to other projects.
 > 
 > What does that really mean, since XEmacs is open source?

Of course XEmacs source code would continue to exist.  AFAIK Bitbucket
has no policy to shut down inactive repos.  But the project could shut
down.  That is, no infrastructure support for users and would-be
developers.  No MLs, no central archives, no binary packages.  This
mailing list no longer costs me hours each week, but I'd guess I spend
an hour to two hours a month on moderation and maintenance.  I imagine
the same is true for Norbert maintaining packages and Vin for 21.4.

And thre are proactive tasks that need to be done.  The Tux
infrastructure is creaking (and so is their administration; the most
active admin there claims he isn't an admin and is more interested in
preventing spam than in delivering mail).  We have an alternative host
in mind, but I need to free up some "round tuits" and implement it
(and that task gets more daunting all the time with each newsclip on
yet another exploit of some major site).

 > I don't have any suggestions on the way forward, but [3] seems like
 > not such a good idea.

Yeah, we know that.  But it's the only way we've thought of so far to
get back to feature parity.

Steve