Re: ECB

[Richard Stallman]

    We already have duplication between etags and imenu.

I hope you are not arguing that the presence of some of this flaw in
Emacs now means we should not try to avoid adding more.  I disagree
completely.  To have one flaw is not a good reason to add another.  To
the extent there is duplication between etags and imenu, that is
unfortunate.  More duplication would be more unfortunate.

    It is a different interface which many longtime Emacs users may be
    used to. I don't think ECB can display in a seperate frame, though it
    might be easy to change it so. There may also be modes that speedbar
    supports that ECB does not. Speedbar seems to have special support for
    info for instance, which I don't think is present in ECB.

Assuming ECB is well written and that it can be integrated well with
Emacs, we have a choice between installing ECB along with Speedbar, or
improving ECB to do all the things that Speedbar does, and replacing
Speedbar.  Making ECB subsume Speedbar would produce a simpler editor
that is easier to maintain, so that's the option we should aim for.

Would someone like to determine precisely which features we would
need to add to ECB to make this possible?

Meanwhile, another question is what needs to be done to integrate
ECB into Emacs cleanly.  Could someone take a look at that?

Neither of these questions is a rush.  We won't be doing any of this
before the next release.