Re: Emacs on GNUstep (prerelease)

[Richard Stallman]

The first step is to figure out a complete list of authors; everyone
who wrote more than about 10 lines of material that is in the current
version.  Once you provide this list, we can quickly check who has
signed papers and who has not.

    I'm willing to try.  (And I've already signed over copyright for my own 
    FSF contributions.)

You signed papers for your changes and enhancements to GNUSTEP.
These papers do not cover changes and enhancements to Emacs,
so we would need separate papers for them.

    Note I assume you are talking about the case if we go the route of 
    updating the ns-emacs codebase to 21.  If we go the route of starting 
    from the Carbon-based version, it is OK copyright-wise to use the 
    ns-emacs code as a reference as long as major chunks are not copied 
    directly over, correct?

If you use it as a reference for ideas alone, that does not count as
copying; but if you paraphrase the code, that does legally count as
copying under copyright law, so we would still need papers from the
authors of the old code.

    Is there a summary available anywhere of what the main internal changes 
    to display management were?  I know that, functionally, images, 
    proportional fonts, and the fringe are the main additions.  But maybe 
    there was significant internal revamping?

The display code as a whole has not been redesigned--only some local
parts.  I am not sure which parts.