Re: lua mode

[Stefan Monnier]

> I'm an user of Lua mode, written by Christian Vogler et al. Yesterday I
> contacted him, asking what he thinks about integrating it into the Emacs
> distribution. 

> He kindly answered that he would be fine with that but then would have to
> hand off maintenance due to lack of time. So I offered to do the
> footwork (meaning he did the hard work and I make now the noise ;-)

> Christian is OK signing papers, I'd have to approach the other authors
> bfore anything goes (I'd have to sign papers as well).

> Now I haven't maintained any Emacs package up to now, so I would very
> much appreciate your guidance, if this thing happens.

As you obviously know, one part of Emacs integration is the legal paperwork.
You seem to understand this part.  I wouldn't worry too much about the few
people who might refuse to sign papers, who by the way are not all related
to XEmacs and far from all XEmacs people refuse to sign paperwork, so it's
unfair to associate the problem with the XEmacs project.  When I collected
the paperwork for PCL-CVS, I've had to deal with one author who wouldn't
sign papers and another who I simply wasn't able to reach.  The end result
was simply that I had to check more carefully their contribution and
remove/rewrite the corresponding code (PCL-CVS was an old package, so some
of the code could be removed without affecting anything because it had been
superceded anyway).

> One thing Christian wishes is that the package continues to work well
> with XEmacs. Thus I might need special guidance with those of you
> experienced in maintenance of such dual packages.

This part of the maintenance is up to you.  Basically, being integrated in
Emacs means that it will live in the Emacs CVS repository, that Emacs
maintainers may make minor changes in it without warning (which may
temporarily break XEmacs compatibility or even compatibility with older
Emacsen), and that it has to adapt to the freeze state before a release
(but you can keep on working if you do it on a branch, anyway).
I.e. you can make XEmacs specific changes just fine.


        Stefan