Re: [emacs-bidi] Re: Sun Israel to Pledge Support for IGLU - IBM does.

[Matan Ninio]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

> On Thu, 25 Oct 2001, Ehud Karni wrote:
> 
> > He also said they are willing to cooperate on Emacs-Bidi, so I think
> > this is now on the hands of Eli.
> 
> No one from IBM (or from any other place) contacted me and offered help 
> in working on Emacs support for bidirectional editing.  So it cannot be 
> on my hands.
> 
> <rant>
> For the record--and I urge everybody to please listen carefully, because 
> I'll only say that this once--I think I'm not up to this job: it's too 
> huge and too above my head, as far as my knowledge, talents, and free 
> time are considered.  However, after waiting for two years for someone to 
> step forward and offer to work on this, I came to a sad conclusion that 
> nothing is going to happen unless I do it myself.  So I'm doing it, as 
> best as I can.  Alone.
> </rant>
> 
> P.S.  I should add right here and now that all the good people on the 
> emacs-bidi mailing list (and elsewhere, where I discuss these matters 
> from time to time) should not be offended by the above rant: I'm grateful 
> for lost of useful inputs I always get when I ask some question or want 
> to discuss some related issue.  Thanks a lot!

Hi Eli.
Taking up the project of bidi support for Emacs is a task I find far too
big for the likes of me.  It requires significant understanding of the
internals of Emacs's new display engine, multybyte representation and
quite a lot of other similar far-from-trivial aspects of Emacs. I have
none of the above, and I don't have the time to aster them, nor the
programing skills required when tackling such tasks.
On the other hand, if there was _some_ bidi core available, I would have
probably done some work on it (as we started doing when the 20.4 patch
from Handa-San was relevant).  Someone of your knowledge and skill can
probably, without investing all that much time and effort, build a
framework for bidi that is far less intimidating.  With a 70% working
model, people like myself can add functionality (printing, input/output
for various formats and so on), or trace and fix bugs and glitches.
On a 95% working model I can probably give it to our students, and have
300 testers locate the more allusive bugs).  But the initial framework
is far over my ability.
  
I can't see anyone that is nearly as qualified to setup this framework.
I really hope you will be willing to take this important project and
bootstrap it.
                yours, Matan Ninio

> 
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-- 
Matan Ninio             
--------------------------------+----------------------------------
Contrary to popular belief, Unix is user friendly.  It just happens
to be selective about who it makes friends with.  -- Dave Parnas