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Re: New maintainer


From: John Wiegley
Subject: Re: New maintainer
Date: Tue, 06 Oct 2015 15:59:33 -0700
User-agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/24.5 (darwin)

>>>>> Karl Fogel <address@hidden> writes:

> Given the context and past discussions, I think you would better assume that
> Richard meant "If GCC doesn't *actually* support the feature, then Emacs
> shouldn't add support for that feature just because Clang does." I think at
> the very least the criterion would be that an actual patch to GCC must
> exist, even if no release of GCC includes it yet.

OK, there are a few details here, and I'm hoping Richard will clarify. Let's
assume some feature X that one might want of a compiler. There are a few ways
GCC might relate to this feature:

  1. It has X, and we can expose it to Emacs.
  2. It has X, but does not provide it in a useful way, because doing so is
     against FSF policy.
  3. It could have X, but doesn't yet.
  4. It will never have X, since providing it would be prohibitively
     expensive, or against policy.

The question is, assuming Clang falls into first category, what is the
situation for Emacs?

  A. Emacs is only allowed to provide the feature for GCC, and must wait until
     GCC makes it available (if ever).

  B. Emacs can only offer the feature for other compilers too, but only once
     it is able to offer it for GCC. This means we are blocked on GCC
     development before we can support other compilers.

  C. If Emacs can support the feature in a _general_ fashion -- so that GCC
     could just as easily be supported as Clang -- then Clang support is
     allowed before GCC support, assuming Clang has it and GCC doesn't (or
     might never).

  D. Emacs is allowed to directly support Clang features that GCC never will,
     because this makes Emacs a better editor.

I'm pretty sure D is out, based on RMS' past comments. I also think A is out.
My question is whether Emacs project policy is B, C, or something more.

John



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