Re: Release timelines and Unicode2 branch

[Steven Tamm]

Sorry to jump in late,
Emacs.app is the name of the bundle that contains the app.  On Mac OS  
X Finder and throughout the graphical interface the name appears as  
"Emacs".  Any build of emacs that is meant to be run from the Mac  
graphical interface should be called "Emacs".

Aqua = Name of the look and field of the Mac OS X windowing system.   
It is a description of the Theme of the Mac OS X.
Carbon = Name of the C interface to the Mac OS X windowing system.   
Based on Mac OS 9 APIs.
Cocoa = Name of the ObjC interface to the Mac OS X windowing system.   
Based on Next/OpenStep.  For the most part compatible with GNUStep.   
The incompatibilities are minor and mostly have to do with image  
rendering and font handling.

The name "emacs on aqua" is misleading and bad for technical reasons  
(it's like saying Emacs for Clearlooks).

The default build on mainline for Mac OS X is referred to as "Carbon"  
as distinct from the "X11" build.   But it's still "Emacs", as would  
a build based on GNUStep compiled under Cocoa.

As for the unicode branch, the way that unicode font handling is done  
on the Mac (ATSUI) is different from the old-style (Quickdraw) that  
is used in the Carbon port.    Quickdraw is based on MBTE and  
converting it to unicode is hard.  I've done some work on rewriting  
the text rendering to use ATSUI, but I ran into some performance  
problems due to the way that fonts and styles are handled in ATSUI .   
It would be easier to port a GNUStep based version to use utf8 in an  
efficient manner based on NSLayoutManager: but any GNUStep based  
version of Emacs will suffer from some pretty tricky threading issues  
due to Apple's strange implementation of menu handling.  It took a  
lot of effort to figure it out with Carbon.  Also, maintaining  
backwards compatibility of font spec's is nigh impossible.  But I  
haven't looked at the cocoa port of emacs in forever.

-Steven

On Sep 20, 2005, at 11:43 PM, Richard M. Stallman wrote:

> "Emacs.app" is a good name.  Mac users will recognize its relevance,
> but it doesn't publicize Macintosh otherwise.
>
> So let's use that.
>
>
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