Re: Nextstep build uses iso-latin by default. WHY?

[Stefan Monnier]

> I never understood why Railwaycat's changes are not merged to the
> official repo, but is it because of that FSF policy?

No, that policy doesn't have anything to do with it (tho of course,
that policy means that the mac port got changes which we wouldn't want
to include in Emacs).

The reason is mostly historical: the mac port is based on the macosx
support that was present in older Emacsen.  At some point that code
ended up without anyone willing to maintain it, whereas there was
a newer macosx port available using the a newer API, which also happened
to be the API used in GNUstep.  So that alternative port had everything
going for it: actively maintained, using a newer API with a brighter
future (the API that Emacs was using at that point had an uncertain
future), and it supported not only macosx but also GNUstep.

So Emacs switched to that "NS" port.  More or less around that same
time, Yamamoto Mitsuharu started to work on the "old" code and adapt it
to the newer version of the old API.  And here we are.

There's no point in Emacs coming with two different macosx ports, so
incorporating Yamamoto Mitsuharu's version into Emacs would mean
dropping the current "ns port" and that comes with various downsides
as well.

My main disappointment with all this story is that the GNUstep port
never really work(s|ed).  It's worked just enough that Jan managed a few
times to fix some problems on the macosx port by reproducing them and
fixing them in GNUstep.


        Stefan