| Re: Continuing Linux Education [message #47467 is a reply to message #47438] |
Fri, 10 February 2006 09:53   |
JD Smith
Messages: 850
Registered: December 1999
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Senior Member |
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On Wed, 08 Feb 2006 02:33:35 +0100, David Kastrup wrote:
> Mark Hadfield <m.hadfield@niwa.co.nz> writes:
>
>> JD Smith wrote:
>>> [snip]
>>> Mostly habit and inertia, but Emacs at (unreleased) version 22 actually
>>> surpasses XEmacs in many ways, at least for what I do. It builds
>>> trivially for X11 on all Unixes and OSX, for Carbon under OSX, Windows,
>>> etc. Some of my most used modes, like AUCTeX, target GNU Emacs by
>>> default.
>
> I think that is an unfair characterization. AUCTeX works as well as can
> be expected on XEmacs, and that is due to a lot of hard work by the AUCTeX
> developers. We even offer a finished XEmacs package from the download
> site of AUCTeX <URL:http://www.gnu.org/software/auctex>. It is a pity that
> XEmacs development policies thwart our work and support of XEmacs at every
> turn. For example, XEmacs is distributed with outdated AUCTeX packages
> due to policy reasons (XEmacs does not accept packages that are not
> maintained in the XEmacs package CVS, have the XEmacs package structure
> and are built by the XEmacs package build system). Those policy reasons
> mean that packages intended for Emacs are only infrequently checked into
> XEmacs, and often by volunteers not intimate with the code.
Hi David:
Didn't realize you read our group! For those of you who don't know,
David is the primary author/maintainer of AUCTeX. If you use (X)Emacs
and edit LaTeX, run, don't walk to the link he lists above.
I apologize for any mis-characterization, but I definitely understand
your difficulties. I have similar troubles trying to get IDLWAVE to
play nice within both GNU Emacs and XEmacs, and as a result it tends
to work best on my platform of choice: GNU Emacs. GNU Emacs has it's
own flavor of development "lock-in", with the result that it is
incredibly difficult to keep a single complex package up to date on
both platforms, even when code incompatibilities are not the issue.
This is really a natural consequence of the ancient schism between
these two camps, and there's really not much that can be done about
it, it seems.
> More often than not, packages running on both Emacs and XEmacs are quite
> better maintained on Emacs. Of course, there are some XEmacs-only
> packages, too.
That was essentially what I was trying to say about AUCTeX, which is
also a good characterization of IDLWAVE.
>> Yes, I just tried the Emacs (version 21.1) that's currently bundled with
>> Cygwin and was pleasantly surprised.
>
> Guffaw. 21.1 would be rather old. 21.4 is the last _released_ version,
> but many people nowadays work with a snapshot of what is to become 22.1.
Yes, and perhaps sometime this year we'll have a release of Emacs 22
in hand! This by the way points out one major advantage XEmacs has
over Emacs: it decouples its core releases from add-on packages (like
IDLWAVE), so they can be updated more often than every 4-5 years. I
have some code I contributed to the CVS tools of GNU Emacs in late
2000 that has not yet gone into a shipping Emacs version.
Thanks for your efforts with AUCTeX. I use it, and the Reftex module
of Carsten Dominick (former IDLWAVE maintainer) nearly every day.
JD
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