xemacs-beta: etc/NEWS comparison

comparison etc/NEWS @ 42:8b8b7f3559a2 r19-15b104

Import from CVS: tag r19-15b104

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date	Mon, 13 Aug 2007 08:54:51 +0200
parents	ac2d302a0011
children	6a22abad6937

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-:5d6df4963a99
+:8b8b7f3559a2
 XEmacs Release Notes........details of the changes between releases
 New users should look at the next section on "Using Outline Mode".  You will
 be more efficient when you can navigate quickly through this file.  Users
-interested in some of the details of how XEmacs differs from FSF GNU Emacs
+interested in some of the details of how XEmacs differs from GNU Emacs
 should read the section "What's Different?".  Users who would to know which
 capabilities have been introduced in each release should look at the
 appropriate subsection of the "XEmacs Release Notes."
 N.B.  The term "FSF GNU Emacs" refers to any release of Emacs Version 19
 NOTE: Lucid, Inc. is currently out of business but development on XEmacs
 continues strong.  Recently, Amdahl Corporation and INS Engineering have
 both contributed significantly to the development of XEmacs.
-** Why Haven't XEmacs and FSF GNU Emacs Merged?
-===============================================
-This question comes up again and again on comp.emacs.xemacs and other
-newsgroups and mailing lists.  Recently in fact there was a long, heated
-thread about this issue.
-Here is what one XEmacs developer said about this issue.
-DISCLAIMER: This is provided for informational purposes only and does
-_NOT_ necessarily represent the opinions of any of the other XEmacs
-developers or of any of the organizations involved.  Keep in mind
-that this is a highly charged issue with differing and strongly-held
-opinions held by the various parties involved.
-Subject: Re: elisp code in GNU Emacs/XEmacs
-From: wing@666.com (Ben Wing)
-Message-ID: <wingDqGwLH.K6w@netcom.com>
-Date: Fri, 26 Apr 1996 11:44:05 GMT
-In article <9xo91fmordx.fsf@bcarsf26.nortel.ca>, Stephane Boucher
-<sbo@bcarsf26.nortel.ca> wrote:
-Well, I don't think the number of volunteers is greater by having 2
-Emacsen. I think your affirmation holds true because of the
-inhability of the various parties involved to work together and
-compromise. If people could all work together, I don't think there
-would be any benifit in having 2 Emacsen. It may seem profitable
-right now, but in the long run, I think everyone looses. The time
-everyone spends porting back and forth, and imitating what the other
-has done is not spent to do new features. I've presonnally
-experienced a project split in the past, and in the end everyone
-lost.
-I don't want to try to blame anybody for the current fiasco. But we do
-have a fiasco. That is unfortunate. There are so many contributors
-out there that if everyone worked together we might be looking
-forward to having, say, threads in Emacs. But instead, as someone
-told me not that long ago, maybe we'll soon see a new editor come out
-based on Java. Threads will be part of it at no extra cost, and those
-people still using Emacs will continue to curse at the fact that they
-can't start GNUS while typing an E-mail, and the various Emacs
-contributors will continue to argue among themselves, nitpicking
-about how to get the perfect solution, rather than try to move
-forward. Meanwhile, people will enjoy using a new state of the art
-editor.
-Don't think we're just being needlessly perverse by continuing to have
-XEmacs. I'm well aware of the problems in having a project split, and
-don't think for a minute that we haven't tried (extremely hard, in
-fact) to come up with a merge.
-Unfortunately, as I have said before, the odds of this happening are
-quite low due to severe conflicts (both technical, procedural, and
-philosophical) between RMS and the XEmacs developers. If we were to
-assent to even half of what RMS wants in a merged Emacs, it would take
-years of work to produce the merged Emacs, and the result would be
-less powerful than the existing XEmacs.
-Since so many people seem so misinformed about this problem, I'll go
-ahead and state the fundamental dividing issues:
-1. RMS does not believe in data abstraction, and cannot be convinced
-of the folly of this. This by itself is such a huge division that
-it makes a merge basically unthinkable. Because of this, FSF Emacs
-is basically unmaintainable by anyone other than RMS. RMS has
-consented to all the data abstraction I want provided that I take
-sole responsibility for writing this code (which basically means
-I'd have to write almost all of the code or rewrite most of his
-code), and provided that he can use this issue as a bargaining
-chip to get concessions of his own.
-2. RMS sees the merge process as a series of mutual concessions
-traded back and forth. IMHO this is reasonable for a peace treaty
-but absurd for a piece of software -- we have to have technical
-agreement on the major issues involved, and the chance of that
-happening is basically nil.
-3. RMS has insisted in full backwards compatibility with all aspects
-of FSF Emacs, no matter how ugly; and furthermore, this backwards
-compatibility must work fast enough to make existing code run
-without problem. This basically means that there would have to be
-parallel C implementations of events, keymaps, and many other data
-structures. This not only will take months or years of extra work
-to implement, but poses some fundamental technical problems due to
-the non-abstractedness of FSF Emacs (e.g. in FSF Emacs keymaps are
-conses or vectors and a lot of code depends on this, and
-reconciling this with XEmacs's primitive keymap type is difficult
-to impossible).
-4. RMS will not even consent to neutral names for the two editors. He
-objects to call his editor FSF Emacs because for some unfathomable
-reason he finds it insulting. He suggests just Emacs, which I find
-not only insulting (XEmacs is just as much Emacs as is FSF Emacs)
-but also quite confusing. He will not even consent to calling his
-editor GNU Emacs without also referring to XEmacs as GNU XEmacs --
-basically a Borg-like assimilation attempt at making XEmacs a GNU
-product, which it is not. (None of the developers of Lucid Emacs
-and XEmacs were or are sanctioned by GNU, and none of us got the
-least bit of assistance or cooperation in doing our work. In fact,
-RMS actively made it harder by choosing to ignore all work
-previously done in XEmacs and adding his own incompatible
-interfaces for functionality already in XEmacs. This makes it
-quite difficult to track FSF Emacs and keep a sane API.) He has
-stated many times, and continues to assert, that most or all of
-the work done on Lucid Emacs and XEmacs was done primarily as a
-testing ground for potential features to be added to FSF Emacs.
-All of the developers of Lucid Emacs and XEmacs assert that this
-is patently false -- so why does RMS continue to insist that this
-is the case?
-ben
---
-"... then the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was
-more painful than the risk it took to blossom." -- Anais Nin
-** Why Another Version of Emacs?  (The Lucid, Inc. Point of View)
-=================================================================
-Lucid's latest product, Energize, is a C/C++ development environment.
-Rather than invent (and force our users to learn) a new user-interface, we
-chose to build part of our environment on top of the world's best editor,
-GNU Emacs.  (Though our product is commercial, the work we did on is
-free software, and is useful without having to purchase our product.)
-We needed a version of Emacs with mouse-sensitive regions, multiple fonts,
-the ability to mark sections of a buffer as read-only, the ability to detect
-which parts of a buffer has been modified, and many other features.
-*** Why Not Epoch or GNU Emacs?
--------------------------------
-For our purposes, the existing version of Epoch was not sufficient; it did
-not allow us to put arbitrary pixmaps/icons in buffers, `undo' did not
-restore changes to regions, regions did not overlap and merge their
-attributes in the way we needed, and several other things.
-We could have devoted our time to making Epoch do what we needed (and, in
-fact, we spent some time doing that in 1990) but, since the Free Software
-Foundation planned to include Epoch-like features in their Version 19, we
-decided that our efforts would be better spent improving GNU Emacs
-instead of Epoch.
-Our original hope was that our changes to GNU Emacs would be
-incorporated into the "official" v19.  However, scheduling conflicts arose,
-and we found that, given the amount of work still remaining to be done, we
-didn't have the time or manpower to do the level of coordination that would
-be necessary to get our changes accepted by the Free Software Foundation.
-Consequently, we released our work as a forked branch of Emacs, instead of
-delaying any longer.
-Roughly a year after Lucid Emacs 19.0 was released, a beta version of the
-Free Software Foundation branch of Emacs 19 was released.  This version
-was better in some areas, and worse in others, as reflects the differing
-focus of our development efforts.
-We planned to continue developing and supporting Lucid Emacs, and merging in
-bug fixes and new features from the Free Software Foundation branch as
-appropriate; we did not plan to discard any of the functionality that we
-implemented which Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation has
-chosen not to include in his version.
-However, events have overtaken us, and Lucid, Inc. has effectively ceased
-doing business and is (September 1994) in the process of being sold.  Our
-efforts on Lucid Emacs have also ceased and we've turned over the continued
-enhancement of Lucid Emacs to the University of Illinois under Chuck
-Thompson, a member of the Lucid Emacs team and a maintainer of Epoch.
-At the same time, Lucid Emacs has been renamed XEmacs to reflect the
-substantial contribution of the University of Illinois with the support of
-Sun Microsystems.
-Certain elements of Lucid Emacs, or derivatives of them, have been ported to
-the FSF GNU Emacs.  We have not been doing work in this direction, because
-we feel that Lucid Emacs has a cleaner and more extensible substrate, and
-that any kind of merger between the two branches would be far easier by
-merging the Free Software Foundation changes into our version than the other
-way around.
-We were working closely with the Epoch developers to merge in the
-remaining Epoch functionality which Lucid Emacs does not yet have.  Epoch
-and Lucid Emacs will soon be one and the same thing.  Work is being done on
-a compatibility package which will allow Epoch 4 code to run in XEmacs with
-little or no change.  (As of 19.8, Lucid Emacs is running a descendant of
-the Epoch redisplay engine.)
-** Why Another Version of Emacs?  (The SunPro Point of View)
-============================================================
-Emacs 18 has been around for a long, long time.  Version 19 was supposed to
-be the successor to Emacs 18 with X support.  It was going to be available
-"real soon" for a long time (some people remember hearing about v19 as early
-as 1984!), but it never came out.  v19 development was going very, very
-slowly, and from the outside it seemed that it was not moving at all.  In
-the meantime other people gave up waiting for v19 and decided to build their
-own X-aware Emacsen.  The most important of these was probably Epoch, which
-came from the University of Illinois and was based on v18.
-Around three years ago we decided that we wanted an integrated editor.  We
-contracted with the University of Illinois to provide a number of basic
-enhancements to the functionality in Epoch.  The University of Illinois
-initially was planning to deliver this on top of Epoch code.
-In the meantime (actually some time before we talked with the University of
-Illinois) Lucid had decided that it also wanted to provide an integrated
-environment with an integrated editor.  Lucid decided that the Version 19
-basis was a better one than Version 18 and thus decided not to use Epoch but
-instead work with Richard Stallman, the head of the Free Software Foundation
-and principle author of Emacs, on getting Version 19 out.  At some point
-Stallman and Lucid parted ways.  Lucid kept working and got a Version 19 out
-that they called Lucid Emacs 19.
-After Lucid's v19 came out it became clear to us (the University of Illinois
-and SunPro) that the right thing to do was to push for an integration of
-both Lucid Emacs and Epoch, and to get the deliverables that we were asking
-from the University of Illinois on top of this integrated platform.  Through
-the last two years, SunPro has been actively supporting this product and has
-been investing a comparable amount of effort into it as Lucid has.
-Substantial portions of the current code have originated under the support
-of SunPro, either directly in SunPro, or in the University of Illinois but
-paid for by us.  This code was kept away from Lucid for a while, but later
-was made available to them.  Initially Lucid didn't know that we were
-supporting UofI, but later we were open about it.
-Eventually, all development source trees were synched up.  Currently, there
-is basically no difference in the source trees between what is at the
-University of Illinois and SunPro.
-SunPro originally called the integrated product ERA, for "Emacs Rewritten
-Again".  At some point, SunPro and Lucid came to an agreement to find a name
-for the product that was not specific to either company.  An additional
-constraint that Lucid placed on the name was that it must contain the word
-"Emacs" in it -- thus "ERA" was not acceptable.  The agreed-upon name was
-"XEmacs", and this is what the product has been called starting with the
-19.11 release.
 * What's Different?
 ===================
-** Differences between XEmacs and FSF GNU Emacs 19
+** Differences between XEmacs and GNU Emacs 19
 ==================================================
 In XEmacs, events are first-class objects.  FSF 19 represents them as
 integers, which obscures the differences between a key gesture and the
 ancient ASCII code used to represent a particular overlapping subset of them.
 In XEmacs, keymaps are first-class opaque objects.  FSF 19 represents them as
 complicated combinations of association lists and vectors.  If you use the
 advertised functional interface to manipulation of keymaps, the same code
-will work in XEmacs, Emacs 18, and FSF GNU Emacs 19; if your code depends
+will work in XEmacs, Emacs 18, and GNU Emacs 19; if your code depends
 on the underlying implementation of keymaps, it will not.
 XEmacs uses "extents" to represent all non-textual aspects of buffers;
 FSF 19 uses two distinct objects, "text properties" and "overlays",
 which divide up the functionality between them.  Extents are a
 ======================
 ** Future Plans for XEmacs
 ==========================
-For the curious, the biggest changes in 19.15 will include integration
+This is the end of the line for XEmacs v19.  No new development is planned
-of TM (a MIME package for VM and GNUS), EFS (the next generation of
+on this source tree.  XEmacs 20.1 will contain the functionality in 19.15,
-ange-ftp), and Auc-TeX, and a "lite" distribution that includes a
+and development will continue with XEmacs 20.2. The major new `feature'
-minimal base and a set of optional packages (which will include TM,
+planned in 20.2 will be the introduction of separable packages and the
-EFS, and Auc-TeX, as well as all of the large packages currently
+capability to download and use an XEmacs lite distribution.
-distributed with XEmacs).  There will also still be a full distribution
-that includes all the optional packages.
+** Major Differences Between 19.14 and 19.15
+============================================
-In the longer term, we are also working on a separate branch of XEmacs that
-includes full Asian-language ("MULE") support.  This work is currently in
+Many bugs have been fixed.  An effort has been made to eradicate all
-beta and is being supported by Sun Microsystems.
+XEmacs crashes, although we are not quite done yet.  The overall
+quality of XEmacs should be higher than any previous release.  XEmacs
+now compiles with nary a warning with some compilers.
+-- EFS replaces ange-ftp for remote file manipulation capability.
+-- TM (Tools for Mime) now comes with XEmacs.  This provides MIME
+(Multi-purpose Internet Multi-media Extensions?) support for Mail
+and News.  The primary author is Morioka Tomohiko.
+-- AUCTeX is now included with XEmacs.  The primary author is Per
+Abrahamsen.
+-- Command line processing should work much better now - no more order
+dependencies.
+-- Customization of user options is now handled by the custom package
+written by Per Abrahamsen.
+-- html mode now defaults to using HTML-3.2
+-- VM now has a native MIME mode
+-- The traditional time.el package now has optional modeline graphics
+-- The XEmacs Logo has been changed courtesy of Jens Lautenbacher
+-- The XEmacs build procedure has been changed to make it easier than
+ever to include new packages to be dumped with the binary
+-- Many many package upgraded (thanks go to countless maintainers):
+-- ediff 2.64 (Michael Kifer)
+-- Gnus 5.4.36 (Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen)
+-- w3 3.0.71  (Bill Perry)
+-- ilisp 5.8 (Chris McConnell, Ivan Vasquez, Marco Antoniotti, Rick
+Campbell)
+-- VM 6.22     (Kyle Jones)
+-- etags 11.78 (Francesco Potorti`)
+-- ksh-mode.el 2.9
+-- vhdl-mode.el 2.73 (Rod Whitby)
+-- id-select.el 1.4.5 (Bob Weiner)
+-- EDT/TPU emulation modes should work now for the first time.
+-- viper 2.93 (Michael Kifer) is now the `official' vi emulator for XEmacs.
+-- big-menubar should work much better now.
+-- mode-motion+.el 3.16
+-- backup-dir 2.0 (Greg Klanderman)
+-- ps-print.el-3.05 (Jacques Duthen Prestataire)
+-- lazy-lock-1.16 (Simon Marshall)
+-- fast-lock.el 3.10.2 (Simon Marshall)
+-- reporter 3.3 (Barry Warsaw)
+-- hm--html-menus 5.4 (Heiko Muenkel)
+-- cc-mode 4.387 (Barry Warsaw)
+-- elp 2.37 (Barry Warsaw)
+-- itimer.el-1.05 (Kyle Jones)
+-- floating-toolbar.el-1.02 (Kyle Jones)
+-- balloon-help.el-1.05 (Kyle Jones)
+-- hyperbole-4.023 (Bob Weiner)
+-- cperl-mode-1.31+
+-- OO-Browser 2.10 (Bob Weiner)
+-- Many new packages have been added:
+-- m4-mode 1.8 (Andrew Csillag)
+-- crisp.el - crisp/brief emulation (Gary D. Foster)
+-- Johan Vroman's iso-acc.el has been ported to XEmacs by Alexandre Oliva
+-- psgml-1.01 (Lennart Staflin, James Clark)
+-- python-mode.el 2.90 (Barry Warsaw)
+-- vrml-mode.el (Ben Wing)
+-- enriched.el, face-menu.el (Boris Goldowsky, Michael Sperber)
+-- sh-script.el (Daniel Pfeiffer)
+-- decipher.el (Christopher J. Madsen)
+-- mic-paren.el (Mikael Sj�din)
+-- xrdb-mode.el 1.21 (Barry Warsaw)
+-- redo.el 1.01 (Kyle Jones)
+-- edmacro.el (ported by Hrvoje Niksic)
+-- verilog-mode.el (Michael McNamara)
+-- webjump.el-1.4 (Neil W. Van Dyke)
+-- overlay.el (Joseph Nuspl support for Emacs overlay API)
+-- browse-cltl2.el 1.1 (Holger Schauer)
+-- mine.el 1.17 (Jacques Duthen)
+-- igrep.el 2.56 (Kevin Rodger)
+-- speedbar.el (Eric Ludlam)
+-- frame-icon.el (Michael Lamoureux)
+-- winmgr-mode.el (David Konerding, Stefan Strobel & Barry Warsaw)
+-- whitespace-mode.el (Heiko Muenkel)
+-- detached-minibuf.el (Alvin Shelton)
+-- New function x-keysym-on-keyboard-p helps determine keyboard
+characteristics for key rebinding:
+x-keysym-on-keyboard-p: (KEYSYM &optional DEVICE)
+-- a built-in function.
+Return true if KEYSYM names a key on the keyboard of DEVICE.
+More precisely, return true if pressing a physical key
+on the keyboard of DEVICE without any modifier keys generates KEYSYM.
+Valid keysyms are listed in the files /usr/include/X11/keysymdef.h and in
+/usr/lib/X11/XKeysymDB, or whatever the equivalents are on your system.
+-- preceding-char and following-char have been obsoleted.  Use the
+much safer and correct functions char-after and char-before instead.
+-- Many symbols present for compatibility with GNU Emacs no longer
+generate bytecompiler warning messages
+-- Installed info files are now compressed (support courtesy of Joseph J Nuspl)
+-- (load-average) works on Solaris, even if you're not root. Thanks to
+Hrvoje Niksic.
+-- OffiX drag-and-drop support added
+-- lots of syncing with 19.34 elisp files, most by Steven Baur
+-- M-: (eval-expression) is now enabled by default since it is much
+more difficult to type.
 ** Major Differences Between 19.13 and 19.14
 ============================================
 XEmacs has a new address!  The canonical ftp site is now
 and `end-closed' now work correctly w.r.t. text properties.
 -- The `face' property of extents and text properties can now
 be a list.
--- The `mouse-face' property from FSF GNU Emacs is now supported.
+-- The `mouse-face' property from GNU Emacs is now supported.
 It supersedes the `highlight' property.
--- `enriched' and `facemenu' packages from FSF GNU Emacs have been ported.
+-- `enriched' and `facemenu' packages from GNU Emacs have been ported.
 -- New functions for easier creation of dialog boxes:
 `get-dialog-box-response', `message-box', and `message-or-box'.
 -- `function-min-args' and `function-max-args' allow you to determine
 *** Keymaps
 -----------
-The FSF GNU Emacs concept of `function-key-map' is now partially
+The GNU Emacs concept of `function-key-map' is now partially
 implemented.  This allows conversion of function-key escape sequences
 such as `ESC [ 1 1 ~' into an equivalent human-readable keysym such as
 `F1'.  This work will be completed in 19.14.  The function-key map is
 device-local and controllable through the functions
 `device-function-key-map' and `set-device-function-key-map'.
 The mouse internals in mouse.el have been rewritten.  Hooks have been
 provided for easier customization of mouse behavior.  For example, you
 can now easily specify an action to be invoked on single-click
 (i.e. down-up without appreciable motion), double-click, drag-up, etc.
-Some code from FSF GNU Emacs has been ported over, generalizing some of
+Some code from GNU Emacs has been ported over, generalizing some of
 the X-specific mouse stuff.
 ** INCOMPATIBLE CHANGE **: The function `set-mouse-position' accepts
 a window instead of a frame.

Mercurial > hg > xemacs-beta

comparison etc/NEWS @ 42:8b8b7f3559a2 r19-15b104