🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <CRAFFERT.93May24134516@nostril.lehman.com> craffert@nostril.lehman.com (Colin Owen Rafferty) writes:


   Hello-

   So now that emacs 19.7 has been released, what do we do?  Allegedly,
   it incorporates all of the extra stuff that epoch does.  Is this true?
   If so, when does epoch become obsolete?  If not, what seems to be the
   correct approach.

Well, the real emacs 19 does incorporate some of the features of
Epoch, but not all...  In particular, the x event handling support,
multiple fonts, incremental redisplay, etc of epoch are all NOT in
emacs 19 at this time (although they may be, in the future).  Epoch
is, as far as we're concerned, already obsoleted by Lucid emacs.
We're working on merging with Lucid Emacs because it has some features
(menu bars, widget/Xt base, key events, glyphs, etc) that make it
nicer than both epoch and emacs 19.  So, the next release of epoch
will essentially be the same as a release of lucid emacs, at which
point we'll probably be merging the names too, in some way.


   Can anyone out there who has been involved with development of 19.7
   give any advice as to what approach people may want to take in moving
   back to "real" emacs.

I'm afraid I cannot help you with this...  Lemacs/epoch will be
epoch-compatible, so there is nothing we need to do to address this.

Personally, my feeling on the matter is that epoch was a stopgap out
of necessity until the real emacs 19 appeared.  In the mean time the
emacs world has effectively bifurcated, into those who want emacss
that are stand-alone kitchen sinks with everything in the emacs (the
"real emacs 19 approach") and those who see that emacs has to play a
part in integrated environments in the future, and thus be, and
become, more widgety (the lucid emacs approach).  Since we built epoch
to fill our own research needs, we feel that we should persue things
in the direction most appropriate for us, which is integrated software
process support/collaboration support environments, and lucid emacs
makes more sense to us, so we're pushing our effort in that direction
for now.

Of course, we also would like to move nice features of epoch into the
real v19 too, and we hope to work with RMS on this in the future.
However, FSF have very stringent code input requirements, such as
every patch being motivated.  I applaud this, since they might well
have to maintain the resulting mess, but don't have the time or
resources to provide the epoch-isms to them at this degree of clarity
right now.

Personally, I dont have a strong negative image of one, and positive
image of the other; it's just that for the things that we do, the
Xt/widget direction, key events, menus, etc, makes much more sense.
In many respects, to me, lemacs is what we really should have done
with epoch in the first place.

So:  to all you happy epochers out there:  watch out for an epoch
5.0/lucid merge some time in late summer or early fall.  And if you
want to return to regular emacs, thank you for your support,
encouragement and bug fixes, and I hope that over time this
bifurcation will heal itself.

-- Simon Kaplan
--
Simon Kaplan					kaplan@cs.uiuc.edu 
Department of Computer Science			uiucdcs!kaplan@uunet.uu.net
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign	
1304 W. Springfield Ave				phone: +1 217 244 0392
Urbana Illinois 61801, USA			fax:   +1 217 333 3501