"stay the course" vs. fork? [LWN.net]

"stay the course" vs. fork?

Posted May 3, 2007 7:06 UTC (Thu) by bkoz (guest, #4027)
Parent article: A tale of two release cycles

One of the vaunted advantages of the GPL is the ability to fork when a maintainer is being disagreeable or otherwise unrealistic. Perhaps this is that time?

This part of the email:

Sadly, RMS seems determined to "stay the course", instead of adopting
strategies that have been proven to work in other software projects.

Reminds me of gcc, pre-egcs.

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"stay the course" vs. fork?

Posted May 3, 2007 7:59 UTC (Thu) by bkoz (guest, #4027) [Link]

This is the old fork: I believe there is already substantial divergence between emacs 22 and xemacs 21.5.27, which is not the point. (Which is to get the current FSF emacs 22 sources out, and the emacs project back on a more regular release schedule.)

"stay the course" vs. fork?

Posted May 3, 2007 9:22 UTC (Thu) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989) [Link]

The true, strategic horror of emacs/xemacs is that significant manhours are wasted trying to maintain codebases that work well in either environment.
Talk about pushing jell-o up a hill with a toothpick.

"stay the course" vs. fork? (forking the question thread, ok?)

Posted May 3, 2007 13:43 UTC (Thu) by TxtEdMacs (guest, #5983) [Link]

I read that the xemacs group wanted to merge back into emacs, within the last year or so. It was my impression that RMS rejected the offer out of hand and perhaps spitefully. Would you happen to know if there is any truth to my, admittedly, superficial impression? I remember too when RMS rejected an xemacs request to use the emacs documentation. That may explain why I have the predisposition to interpret RMS's stances negatively, however, I am aware of my bias and facts can change my opinion.

Several years ago I used xemacs running on a Unix over straight emacs, I think it was in the version 20.x series (21.x was released about that time, but I didn't upgrade). At the same time I was trying not to use Linux too much at home, but there too I thought I preferred xemacs over emacs, though neither worked quite the same as under Unix. I thought the xemacs under Unix was easier than either under linux, however, now I just remember to hit the delete key first when typing into a highlighted region.

Now using Linux all the time, I prefer emacs, where my use of either the Mac or Windows is so minor as to not warrant mention.

xemacs merge?

Posted May 10, 2007 7:46 UTC (Thu) by anton (guest, #25547) [Link]

I read that the xemacs group wanted to merge back into emacs, within the last year or so. It was my impression that RMS rejected the offer out of hand

I have not heard of that, but if they wanted to merge, the FSF would want them to assign the copyright to the FSF, and I don't think the xemacs people can do that. Their distributed copyright situation also means that they cannot switch their manual to the GFDL, and thus xemacs cannot incorporate parts of the GNU Emacs manual.

"stay the course" vs. fork?

Posted May 3, 2007 9:05 UTC (Thu) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link]

While I'm an old-time XEmacs user myself, one must confess that XEmacs' development doesn't go forward smoothly either. There are too few active developers in that branch.