Re: Emacs on OS X development

[Ted Zlatanov]

On Tue, 31 Jul 2012 14:31:30 -0400 Adrian Robert <address@hidden> wrote: 

AR> As far as a merge, one way would be to bring in the event-handling
AR> from the Mac port to the NS port.  When I looked at this it seemed
AR> practical, but would be a fairly intense effort, say 5 full-time days,
AR> probably an underestimate since a solution for GNUstep would need to
AR> be maintained.  Then there would also be the text rendering.  Since
AR> that is more modular, it might be possible to bring in Yamamoto's
AR> backend almost whole as a compile-time option.  I also don't think the
AR> current NS backend has that many deficiencies, but for whatever reason
AR> they've stayed there (text shaping, line spacing, font selection).

AR> The second merge option would be to rework portions of the Mac port to
AR> more heavily utilize the Cocoa APIs, to the point it could be ifdef'd
AR> to run on GNUstep.  Yamamoto could provide the best assessment here,
AR> but my feeling when I looked at it was that it would not be easy.
AR> Definitely more work than going the other way.

Based on your and Mitsuharu-san's reply, I think merging his work into
the NS port is the better path rather than trying to bring the Mac port
into the Emacs tree.  If you can define the work necessary to do the
event handling and text rendering rework, plus the other specific
features of the Mac port that are missing in the NS port, that would be
a helpful TODO list for any contributors.

Thanks
Ted