Re: Long-term survival

>>>>> "Stephen" == Stephen J Turnbull <[email protected]> writes:

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

My own estimation is that I can't see a GTK2 port being anywhere near ready by
the time of the 22.0 release.  In fact I suspect that the Xft patch will get
into the mainline before GTK2; at least they have a substantial codebase so
show off at the moment.

Contributions from other developers are always welcome.  Starting from a very
limited knowledge of both, I found understanding the XEmacs redisplay code
harder than understanding GTK, so you don't need to be a GTK expert to help.

Stephen> None of this [better text processing features] requires, and only DnD
Stephen> might be facilitated by, better support of "modern" widget sets.

This is true, but is not the whole story.  IMHO XEmacs' strength over Emacs
has been its better integration with the surrounding desktop.  In fact at the
time of first release it was the best integrated X application around, showing
everyone else how things like cut and paste and session management should be
done.

I'd like to see this advantage continued, so it should integrate with whatever
desktop service are available on the platform.  Eg, The Cocoa port in MacOS X
should support the Services menu, the GTK and KDE versions should support
their themes and file managers, etc.  If these are ignored then we'll be like
xcalc on modern desktops, perfectly functional but old fashioned and less
appealing.

The GTK contributions are part of my efforts to make this Like a reality.

Malcolm

-- 
		     Malcolm Purvis <[email protected]>