Re: auth-source.el and eieio

[Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

On Mon, 14 Feb 2011 12:16:44 -0800 Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> wrote: 

LI> Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com> writes:
>> This is fine with me.  I thought CEDET was only available as a tarball,
>> that's why I suggested getting the whole thing.  But I see it's
>> available from Bazaar so it should be pretty easy to set up a sync to
>> the Gnus repo.

LI> I'm not familiar with the entire CEDET thing, but would it make sense to
LI> include eieio.el in gnus/contrib for older Emacsen?

Yes, but maybe gnus/lib/ instead.  But see below.

On Mon, 14 Feb 2011 21:45:31 +0100 Reiner Steib <reinersteib+gmane@imap.cc> wrote: 

RS> IIUC, Gnus doesn't even compile with Emacs < 24.  

No, 23.1 or earlier currently (not intentionally, I thought EIEIO came
in earlier).  Considering 23.2 came out May 2010, it's not unreasonable
to expect it in 2011.

RS> Fiddling with files from contrib to get a working, compiled Gnus is
RS> unacceptable, IMHO.

There will be no fiddling.  The gnus/lib/ directory (or whatever we call
it) will be part of the Gnus installation and `configure' will DTRT.

But again, this will affect those that a) want to run bleeding-edge
Gnus, and b) don't want a recent Emacs.  Is that a real problem that
justifies all that work?  We can just ask for Emacs 23.2 or newer.  

I really think that's reasonable considering that XEmacs also has EIEIO
and reinventing the `defclass' wheel is both painful and time-consuming.

There are many pieces of Gnus that could use EIEIO.  spam.el, for
instance, could easily model spam backends with defclass instead of
hacked-up lists, and the code would be simpler.

On Mon, 14 Feb 2011 21:44:05 +0100 David Engster <deng@randomsample.de> wrote: 

DE> EIEIO is not just one file, more like 20. So I'd say just tell people
DE> where to get it if they want/must use Emacs <=23.1. We could make an
DE> ELPA-package or make it downloadable for el-get.

I'll go with that if we decide to support Emacs 23.1 or older and the
gnus/lib/ idea doesn't fly.

Ted