That old flamewar again [was Re: recent smiley.el changes]

[Jan Vroonhof <jan@xemacs.org>]

I normally keep out of this kind of flame-war. Things have changed for
the better recently and I don't want to disturb that by dragging up
the bad old days. I hope the readers of 'ding' who must be all to
familiar with this particular flamewar will forgive me this message.

Dave Love <d.love@dl.ac.uk> writes:

> Note in this connexion that writing common image code is messy since
> XEmacs maintainers didn't cooperate on a common API 

This lies somewhere in between slander and 'the pot calling the kettle
black'. Work on Emacs 21 started (or appeared to) long after I joined
the XEmacs development and I don't recall _any_ request for such
cooperation. At the same time request for access to the fledgling
Emacs 21 for API comparisons from interesting XEmacs maintainers were
being obstructed.  The only inter-operability work was actually done
by poor elisp developers being hurt by this. Per and Bill, you know
who you are :-) and Thank you.

Luckily the latter has been solved, let's hope it is not too late.[1]

> and the XEmacs API is poorly documented.

Actually this particular bit of XEmacs is rather extensively
documented. I wish everything would be up to that standard. Maybe it
is not enough, but other people reimpleting APIs have made do with
less. And I would have been happy to ask question.

> Also the change recording in XEmacs and Gnus
> has often made it difficult or impossible to figure out the copyright
> status of code.

I am fairly sure XEmacs was already using CVS when smiley.el was
created and Lars has been making ChangeLogs since day one[2]. 

If you think chasing paperwork is more dull than coding[3] and that a
clean rewrite is a better way to demonstrate new API's, both of which
I agree with, then please just say just that, and don't use it to vent
some kind of (unbased IMO) grudge.

Jan

P.S. I will NOT reposond to follow-ups on this message on
non-appropriate fora, such as the ding list, if at all.

Footnotes:

[1] For the Emacs world as a whole, not just XEmacs<->Emacs
compatability.

[2] In fact I thought he was doing paperwork as well. The 'My gnus
changes are public domain' form was the first I ever sent.

[3] This is actually a worrying trend. A lot more non-paperwork Free
software is being produced, does this mean Emacs and other core GNU
software will suffer from the effective NIH syndrome created and if so
is there some cut-off point where that is hurting more than the clear
provenance gives you benefit? Has it maybe already been reached?