Re: running viewmail under emacs 29.3

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 2024-06-24 at 14:37:16 -0400, John Stoffel wrote:

 > Do we need/want to keep Xemacs compatibility?  I'm starting to
 > think we need to maybe trim cruft in a major way... but I'm not an
 > XEmacs user.  But I don't think XEmacs has been really touched in
 > 10 years now.

Hi John,
XEmacs hasn't been touched in 15 years, the latest release is from
2009.

But I'm glad that you ask this question.  I must admit that I'm not
familiar with the VM ELisp code and thus don't know which impact
support of XEmacs has on maintainability.  But if XEmacs is still
supported I assume that a lot of conditional code is involved which
has a negative impact on maintainability.

IMO maintainability of the code should have the highest priority,
especially when new maintainers/developers chime in.

I'm using GNU Emacs (and VM) since 1995.  GNU Emacs already came with
a GUI when lauched under X11 and I had the impression that XEmacs was
already obsolete at that time.  I can't imagine that anybody is using
XEmacs today.  People who still insist on XEmacs today are free to
install an older version of VM.

I suggest to discontinue support for XEmacs and to announce the
dicision in the release notes.  Developers can ignore XEmacs related
code for the time being.  It can be removed later when someone
stumbles over it.  This way not everything has to be done at once but
in the long term it would be nice if all XEmacs related code vanishes.

We had to make similar decisions regarding TeX Live.  We have to drop
support for older versions of Windows occasionally in order to keep
the code maintainable.  Please note that everything has to be tested
on all supported platforms.

Testing VM with both, GNU Emacs and XEmacs is a significant waste of
time.  AFAIK other packages like AUCTeX don't support XEmacs for good
reasons.

Regards,
  Reinhard

-
------------------------------------------------------------------
Reinhard Kotucha                            Phone: +49-511-3373112
Marschnerstr. 25
D-30167 Hannover                    mailto:reinhard.kotucha@gmx.de
------------------------------------------------------------------