need advice about fixing up my new vimpact-mode, a Vim emulation mode based on viper-mode

[Jason Spiro]

Hi help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org readers,

I have created a mode called vimpact-mode, a Vim emulation mode based
on viper-mode.  It is based mainly on snippets of code from around the
Web.  The pre-alpha is at:

http://www.jspiro.com/files/sw/vimpact-mode/vimpact-mode-0.0.1.el

I now have four questions.

Vimpact-mode is currently a major mode; that's bad.  (It uses
define-derived-mode, which unfortunately lets me make major modes
only.)  I want to make it into a minor mode, but I am not sure if I
should make it a derivative of viper-mode or if I should fork the
viper elisp files and distribute my mode's code.

Here are my design goals:

* I plan for all all viper and vimpact functions and customizable
variables to have the same prefix, "viper-".  I don't want some to
begin with "viper-" and some to begin with "vimpact-".  That'd be
confusing.

Question 1:  Do you think I am right: is my way better than the other
option of having a mix of prefixes?

* I'd prefer vimpact to be an add-on to viper, not a fork of it, since
I want vimpact to contain only vim-derived features, not all-new ones.

Question 2:  Do you think I am right about my add-on idea?  Or would
it be better if all or most of the vimpact-mode changes could somehow
be merged into viper-mode (perhaps I could do it)?

Question 3:  How much time would it take me, a mediocre elisp coder,
to make vimpact into a proper minor mode that starts up viper-mode
then adds the vimpact customizations (the add-on idea from before)?
How much time would it take me to merge the vimpact-mode changes into
the viper source code?

Question 4:  Considering that I am an elisp newbie, is anyone willing
to do the work themselves?  :-)  You then would be the maintainer of
vimpact-mode.

Thanks in advance,
Jason Spiro

--
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