Re: Syncing Gnus and Emacs repositories

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <address@hidden>
> Cc: Kenichi Handa <address@hidden>,
>     address@hidden
> Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2007 15:53:09 +0900
> 
>  > So in that case, making such changes in the Unicode branch directly,
>  > as I suggested, would be a good way of installing changes without
>  > interfering with the future merge, right?
> 
> Assuming that those making changes in the Unicode branch are
> thoroughly familiar with it, yes.

Are you sure such a thorough familiarity is indeed required?  AFAIK,
most of the radical changes in the Unicode branch are fairly
low-level; the changes to application-level APIs are relatively minor
and matter in marginal cases.  E.g., most Lisp programs should not
care about the internal representation of characters in buffers and
strings.  Emacs 22 already unifies Latin and various other scripts in
a way that, at least on the outside, closely resembles Unicode-based
representation of characters.

Handa-san, can you comment on this?

> Bottom line: The risks are high, the benefits are small.  I strongly
> recommend against doing substantial work on a CVS branch

Well, the Unicode branch exists for a long time, so we are already
there.

> unless it has a single theme and is explicitly aimed at a single
> merge to mainline, then retirement.

I don't see how the CVS deficiencies are not relevant for a
single-theme development.

In any case, I think switching to Unicode can hardly be classified as
``single-theme'', since it touches so many internals.