Re: theming

[David Reitter]

On 7 Jul 2005, at 15:20, David Kastrup wrote:

> > Making this process a bit easier, making it easier for the user to
> > undo some of these new 'defaults'  by defining groups of
> > customizations in themes would certainly be desirable.

In Aquamacs, this is already the case for many customizations.
For some other stuff - for example the pre-installed fontsets and  
changed menus - this is not possible. That's where we usually tell  
people to use a standard Carbon Emacs.

> > 2. However, over the last two or three months or so, Aquamacs has
> >    come to do much more than that. It blatantly redefines and advises
> >    functions, something which can only be undone by means of extra
> >    customization variables that are checked by the new functions.
>
> Those customization variables can have a default value that lets them
> cause different behavior only when under the Aquamacs theme.
>
> So I don't see this as a principal problem once themes work properly.

Yes, but what about re-definitions of existing functions?
Defadvice them and put a conditional in the defadvice?

> It is a competing fork in the manner that users are not able to make
> it work like standard Emacs with minimal effort.  That means that the
> Aquamacs distribution is only useful for people that don't prefer
> standard Emacs behavior.

Indeed, we explicitly target people who aren't happy with the  
standard behavior. That's the whole point.

> That's not a good state of affairs.

Hmm, I for my part like variety.

> If Aquamacs were
> theme-controlled, one could easily fold the whole kaboodle back into
> the main core, and thus people, say, used to Aquamacs could get the
> same behavior under Windows, and there would be no reason to
> distribute competing binaries for MacOSX.

Well, that would be even better and a long-term goal.
When themes work reliably and are well documented, one could work on  
that.

However, as long as the (IMHO sensible) patches that Seiji Zenitani  
and I have provided (which only pertain to the OS X version) don't  
find their way into the core or get formally rejected with reasons  
given, there's little one can do to turn Aquamacs an add-on package.