James LewisMoss has offered me the maintainership of the Debian
XEmacs packages, and I have accepted. I'm learning how the XEmacs21
package is set up right now, and have begun to work on it. I'm
vendor tracking the anon CVS in a repository on my own machine, with
the Debian stuff on my local trunk. I will likely try and use
`cvs-buildpackage'.
I just found out about `faure', and was able to log in. :-) I'll
try and build Alpha packages too. Neato.
There is a HUGE list of outstanding bugs. It looks like many of them
can be merged... I'll be looking them over for a week I bet. I will
do what I can to clear them. There is also a lot of research I ought
to do in the XEmacs list archives, as well as the Debian list
archives. (pertaining to .emacs vs .xemacs/init.el, and to the
Debian emacsen installation and /etc/emacs.d stuff.)
Expect it to take me at the very least another two weeks to get
things squared away for an upload. In that meantime, I also NEED TO
HAVE MY NEW PGP KEY SIGNED! I lost my old one, have created a new
key, and have not had it verified by another maintainer yet. I live
in Portland, OR, USA, near PSU campus downtown.
I have made a few minor modifications to the standard XEmacs 21.1
setup. I'm tossing them at yous just to clatter in the list for a
few minutes.
- I changed the startups so that the init file is no longer called
"~/.emacs", it's in "~/.xemacs/init.el". The options saved by the
Options menus won't go into "~/.emacs" either, they'll go into
"~/.xemacs/.options.el". It will create the "~/.xemacs/" directory
if it doesn't exist the first time you start XEmacs21.
-- This is so that you'll be able to install Emacs20 and XEmacs21 on
the same box and users won't have to deal with putting cond's into
"~/.emacs" to make it work with both versions. Saving options
with the "customize-*" interface won't cause a version clash
either now.
- The XEmacs lisp has been unbundled (upstream) in this version, and
so I'll be creating a large set of individual library packages for
it. Users can choose which ones to install and which ones to leave
behind as never-gonna-use-it-anyways. I've only begun to have
vague notions of a need to make some sort of plan before I finally
get on with actually tackling this one... I know it'll require a
makefile. 8-p That subproject is on next week's agenda... or maybe
over this weekend. It's raining anyway. (darn)
-- I will name them prefixed by "xemacs" so they sort to the right
place in `dselect'.
- I'll try and make it so that these libraries of lisp and XEmacs
itself can be built using a CVS checkout from the cvs.xemacs.org
repository. I want it to be very automatic and easy to reproduce.
I want tuition for fall term.
- I've got a simple shell script I call `xg' (pasted from a mailing
list message) that checks for a running "gnuserv" by using `fuser',
and if it finds you've got one running, execs `gnuclient "$@"',
otherwise execs `xemacs -f gnuserv-start "$@"'. This way, whether
or not you've already got XEmacs started for the day, you can edit
a file with `xg filename'. Users of `gnuclient' already know about
this, but with a command script included in the package, newbies
will have it provided for them, flattening the learning curve a
little. It's nice to have EDITOR set to `xg'.
- I made a `.kdelnk' for `xg', and some XEmacs icons, properly
quantized to our standard colormap, and sized correctly. (32x32
and 16x16, with transparent backgrounds.) I would like to provide
a gnome icon and "kdelnk"alikes also, but don't know how yet...
That is on my growing debian/ToDo list. I can drop a file from kfm
onto the XE icon, and it pops open a gnuclient window, as expected.
- I sent two wishlist bugs in against xemacs21...
-- I'd like to have a Debian BTS minor-mode for Gnus. I guess it
ought to work for either emacsen. It could use a set of nnml
folders, and work with the email commanded bts server somehow to
make it simpler to work with. I think it's got more potential
than a CGI interface. We'll see... it's a wishlist item for sure
right now. AFAIC, any serious Linux admin uses XEmacs anyway.
-- I'd like to write or help write an `adduser' interface for XEmacs.
I suppose it ought to work in either emacsen also... <sigh> You
can read what I wrote in the wishlist bug report if you like; just
pull up the ones for xemacs21 and look for it.
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