Re: Emacs 20.4 & Pterodactyl & pop3.el

[Jan Vroonhof <vroonhof@math.ethz.ch>]

Stainless Steel Rat <ratinox@peorth.gweep.net> writes:

> But on the other hand, the XEmacs developers did the same thing, just on a
> much larger scale.  Compare my code with the pop3 in XEmacs 21 and you will
> see very, very significant differences.  The XEmacs develpers never
> informed me of these changes, either, nor have they honored my request that
> they change the name so as to avoid confusion.

This is indeed very bad :-( and is in fact very much against "XEmacs
policy". I can only apologize. It seems to be working in other cases
(for instance for EFS, ediff and reftex we forward the patches to the
respective maintainers, they release a new version and then _that_
gets out in the respective XEmacs package).
One of the reasons for having such a policy is that is extremely hard
to get out of such a mess.

Changing name is unfortunately not always an option, especially not
for libraries that are required. Say you write an (almost) completely
compatible implementation of some elisp file, then for the user to
easily make use of is you want the interface (feature name, variable & 
function names) to be identical.

For instance I wrote lazy-shot.el, apart from the replacement of
string "lazy-lock" by "lazy-shot" it is a complete, XEmacs specific,
re-implementation of lazy-lock v2 as shipped with GNU Emacs. The only
things I copied from lazy-shot are doc strings. I tried very hard to
make the interface identical as I wanted the users customization to
work under both Emacs versions. I originally wanted to rename my
variables and functions to lazy-lock for that reason. However Simon
Marshall (the author of lazy-lock) wants me keep the names different
in order to avoid confusion. I have not done the renaming but still
don't like the situation. The problem here is that the name of
variables and function indicates both the interface and a particular
implementation.

To get back to pop3. I don't know why your weren't informed of the
initial changes, however I can see why don't see the newer ones: Andy
seems to have made the fork "official":

;; Maintainer:      Andy Piper <andy@xemacs.org>

;; Keywords: mail, pop3
;; Version: 2.04

;; [..]

;; mostly stolen from epop3mail. Please address problems with this
;; version (2.xx) to [Andy Piper].

Jan