Re: May your change "Factor out lists of operators specially treated by 'make-autoload'." be added to Emacs?

[Samuel Bronson]

On Wed, Nov 16, 2011 at 10:54 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull
<address@hidden> wrote:
> Samuel Bronson writes:

>  > While it's true that the patch won't quite apply cleanly, the
>  > `make-autoload' functions appear to actually have the same structure
>  > (including comments). A human could easily apply it it, making the
>  > necessary adjustments for differences in the actual contents of the
>  > lists. (I guess Ben already assigned copyright to the FSF?)
>
> No!  Ben hasn't assigned copyright as far as I know; you'd have to
> check with the FSF copyright clerk or him, but although he's expressed
> willingness to assign *all* of his code, he attached conditions that
> never were satisfied.  I suspect he would assign small parts if he
> were asked.

While this leaves me rather puzzled as to how the code to which I wish
to apply your refactoring came to be in GNU Emacs, the important thing
is that it *is* here and the refactoring *is* applicable.

> My code is entirely original (as far as replacing hard-coded data with
> a variable reference can be considered "original" :-), and you're more
> than welcome to the docstrings (although the GNU Emacs Docstring
> Police will probably have something to say about style).
>
> You'd have to ask a lawyer to be sure, but ISTM that there should be
> no copyright problems if you insert my defvars (as permitted by GPL
> and conforms to GNU Emacs policy by my assignment).  Then adjust the
> contents to GNU Emacs reality and then go figure out where to use them
> for yourself (your original contribution).  You only need an
> assignment from Ben if you also copy surrounding code from XEmacs for
> some reason.

Again, `make-autoload' is already here, structurally the same as in
XEmacs prior to the patch, so it looks like I'm good to start on this.

I suppose I will have to bring my own copyright assignment papers up
to date at some point, though, now that I've graduated from college.
It would be nice if somebody could tell me how to do that.


This all started because I kept whining in #emacs about
package.el/autoload.el not supporting autoload generation for custom
defun-like macros properly, after I tried to install Icicles from
Marmalade. (It turns out that I already had a Debian package installed
for it anyway, but that's not really the point of this: the point is
that it should be possible to install such packages using package.el.)

Tom Tromey had said this to say:

Nov 16 12:19:37 <tromey> if you fix autoload.el, the rest will follow

... and so I decided to see what I could do.