Re[2]: ECB

[Eric M. Ludlam]

>>> Richard Stallman <address@hidden> seems to think that:
>Could you tell us more about semantic?
>
>For instance, is it written entirely in Emacs Lisp?
>If not, what other languages are needed?  Does it use any
>separate auxiliary programs?
>
>Are you the author of semantic?
>If not, could you tell me how to reach the author?
>It seems very desirable to include semantic in Emacs.

Semantic, and those other libraries it depends on are all written
entirely in Emacs Lisp.  The doc uses makeinfo.  There are two shell
scripts which are optional that use bash.  The scripts allow creation
of data files by calling Emacs in batch mode.  There is a utility that
generates UML diagrams from source code that calls "dot" (released by
ATT as a graph diagram kind of tool.) which is optional.  There were
rumors of a tool for using PostgreSQL as a database backend but I have
not seen news of it lately.

I am the main author of Semantic and all the items not currently in
Emacs that it depends on.  David Ponce is also a primary contributor.
Paul Kinnucan (author of JDEE) wrote the original imenu support, but
there is very little left of his original work.  Klaus Berndl (ECB
author) wrote a regression test.  All other packages that represent
significant works beyond a small patch by other authors are separated
in a "contrib" directory.

A version of semantic from perhaps around the year 2000 is already
fully assigned to the FSF.  I have my paperwork submitted to my
Employer's legal department for clearance on those intervening years
so the current version can be a part of Emacs too.

Semantic depends on several small utilities written in Emacs Lisp by
either myself or David Ponce including tools for simplified Image
loading and use, progress bar display, runtime version dependency
checking, and an implementation of "mode local" variables/functions.

I highly recommend using mode-local.el.  I think it could greatly
simplify the construction of any tool that has slightly different
behaviors in different major modes, or the major modes themselves.
It eliminates the need for hooks or complex functions that contain
lots of `setq' calls, or functions that branch based on a alist of
major modes.

http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/cedet/cedet/common/mode-local.el?view=markup

Semantic also depends on EIEIO which is a CLOS layer also previously
assigned to the FSF.  It too is in the CEDET collection.

You can read about all the tools in the CEDET collection at this web
site:

http://cedet.sourceforge.net

The CEDET package scheme and related Makefiles are merely a
convenience for releasing and building all those tools together.  The
Makefiles are generated by EDE, which adds project management and
Makefile construction with a nifty GUI inside Emacs.

The most complex part of the build is converting grammar files (.by,
or .wy) into Emacs Lisp.  This requires a calling Emacs in batch mode
with Semantic loaded to perform the generation.

Also involved is a special autoload file generator.  It is a copy of
the one that comes with Emacs and modified to handle CLOS constructs
and some Semantic macros.

I hope this answers your questions.
Eric

-- 
          Eric Ludlam:                 address@hidden, address@hidden
   Home: http://www.ludlam.net            Siege: www.siege-engine.com
Emacs: http://cedet.sourceforge.net               GNU: www.gnu.org