Re: NS: ns-expand-space / slider in Preferences dialog not functional

[YAMAMOTO Mitsuharu]

>>>>> On Mon, 9 Mar 2009 09:53:35 +0200, Adrian Robert <address@hidden> said:

> I don't have any personal agenda here except that I like the feature
> as a user.  The "expand-space" feature has been in the NS code for
> 10 or more years.  I didn't introduce it.

I said "introduce" because the NS code hasn't been a part of the
official Emacs distribution.  To become a part of it, the
Cocoa/GNUstep port has to have enough quality such as proper C-g
handling that the port hasn't had for 10 or more years, and reorganize
duplicated/overlapped features.

> For the past few years that I've maintained it on sourceforge, I
> have however enjoyed the feature greatly myself.  I never knew about
> line-spacing in core emacs or if I did it was not of interest to me
> because I'm usually interested in shrinking not expanding lines.  I
> wish it were available for the times I use emacs on X or W32.

> But now that the situation is what it is I stand by what I say
> above: it doesn't interfere with anything in core emacs (as it is /
> should be additive with line-spacing), users benefit from it, and
> others can use it to try and see whether it's something that would
> be worth having on X and W32.  There's no benefit to removing it.

The benefit of removal is apparent: if it is kept, it will introduce
inconsistent multiple interfaces for the same feature when the right
thing is done in a platform-independent way in future.  (I think even
the current situation is problematic with respect to expanding.)
That's why we should avoid introducing platform-specific interfaces
for features that are not inherently specific to the platform.  I
think the developers of the official Emacs (in contrast to those of
private distributions) should keep that in mind.

                                     YAMAMOTO Mitsuharu
                                address@hidden