Re: Long-term survival

Let's move this to XEmacs Design, and get other people's opinions.
Reply-To set to ben and xemacs-design.

>>>>> "Ville" == Ville Skyttä <[email protected]> writes:

    Ville> As a Linux user, I would very much welcome a GTK2 or Qt
    Ville> version.

I see lots of "like" and no real interest (ie, by contributing) in
GTK2 whatsoever, though.  Malcolm is doing his thing, but that's going
to take a while unless we start getting code contributions.

Qt?  We _have_ a Qt version in CVS, which I spent considerable trouble
on ensuring it did get in (rms had legal objections); AFAIK it has
never been checked out.  I certainly haven't seen any build reports.

    Ville> (Or *cough* wxWidgets *cough*).

But what good does it do?  "He who dies with the most supported widget
sets wins"?  Too much attention to widget sets _will_ kill us!

XEmacs is a _text_ processing application.  So: We want to facify and
internationalize our GUI elements.  We need to support DnD.  We need
antialiased fonts for displaying buffer text.  We need to provide
infrastructure to make the toolbar and tabs useful to applications and
even non-developer users.  (I think the progress gauge is beyond hope,
but suggestions are welcome. :-)  Better keyboard support, especially
of XKB.  Support (at least documentation) of the new input methods
that are springing up (IIIMF in general, anthy, xcin, etc) at least on
Linux.

Localization of strings (gettext) would be nice, but isn't essential.

None of this requires, and only DnD might be facilitated by, better
support of "modern" widget sets.  In fact, what I've seen of GTK1, Qt,
and wxWidgets suggests that internationalization will be _hindered_
because we would need to support a rather different (not to mention
inflexible and functionally inferior) model than what we're currently
using.  pango might help there, but what I've seen of pango apps
suggests that it is not at all a panacea.

Sure, if somebody wants to contribute skins or translucent windows or
wxWindows port or whatever, we should take them as long as the costs
of integration aren't too high.  But I don't see how this kind of
thing really translates to "survival".  Survival is about doing what
we do better than anyone else.  What we do is (generalized) text
processing by Lisp.

My bottom line is that if people want to work on GUI stuff, I will
advocate, and help provide, infrastructure support from XEmacs.
Special-topic mailing list?  You got it.  Web pages?  We'll make
space, you maintain it.  Or do it on the Emacswiki, we can provide
links from the right places on our page.  CVS branch, help with
synching?  No problem.  Releases from the experimental branch?  I can
do that.

But what I advocate focusing on is our core competences: Lisp, text,
very basic GUI elements where they integrate well with text
processing, XEmacs-style.

-- 
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences     http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
               Ask not how you can "do" free software business;
              ask what your business can "do for" free software.