Re: How many use eMacs and Gnus on daily basis?

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

notbob <notbob@nothome.com> writes:

> On 2006-06-08, David Z Maze <dmaze@mit.edu> wrote:
>
>> Emacs when it's added them in as well.  XEmacs's other advantage is
>> that it comes with an add-on bundle of approximately every elisp
>> package out there;........
>
> Well, it used to.  No longer.  Now all those packages must be added
> by the user.  I recently downloaded and compiled xemacs only to
> discover basic functions like calendar, gnus, and dired are not
> included.
>
> I found this disclaier:
>
> " In order to reduce the size and increase the maintainability of
> XEmacs, the majority of the Elisp that came with previous releases
> have been unbundled."

Well, but they do provide the "sumo tarballs".  In principle, this
should allow components of XEmacs be updated independently in a more
timely manner.  In practice, it seems to rather have the effect of
developers not being worried about components getting outdated
independently.

At least XEmacs manages quite more frequent releases and partial
updates than Emacs does, but with mixed quality.  Arguably the XEmacs
development and release process scales quite better to the number of
active developers.  Unfortunately, developers are a scarce resource
for both Emacsen.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum