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Re: Bug#729660: ITP: xemacs21 -- highly customizable text editor



On 11/16/2013 11:43 AM, Mark Brown wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 15, 2013 at 09:49:49PM +0000, Dmitrijs Ledkovs wrote:
> 
>> Why should Debian carry this package?
> 
> It's a package that we've carried since forever and which has a
> userbase. 

That's not really an argument. We've also had uae and e-uae
(the Amiga emulators) for ages and they had a user base. Yet,
I filed removal bugs because upstream was no longer existent
and they have been replaced by more modern forks like fs-uae.
There were simply too many bugs that would never get addressed.

Your first mail came with the argument that you think that
xemacs is more visually appealing than emacs. Honestly, emacs
is primarily a tool and not an optical gimmick. Visual
appearance does not bother most users, I'd guess. Most emacs
users use the terminal (-nw) mode anyway.

And the beef I have with xemacs is that it's development
has factually ceased. Looking at the changes over the past
months, I see only marginal changes [1] but no real development.

I never think that's a good idea to upload packages to Debian
where virtually no upstream development is taking place. The
risk of RC bugs not getting fixed in time is simply too high.

I remember fixing RC bugs in several packages in Wheezy during
the freeze where upstream was no longer available and we had
to dig through the code and fix the bugs ourselves. I want
to avoid such situations in the future!

I support Paul's stance on this!

Cheers,

Adrian

> [1] http://www.xemacs.org/Releases/21.5.33.html#ChangeLog

-- 
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
  `-    GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546  0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913

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