Re: [AUCTeX-devel] Further TikZ patches

[Mosè Giordano]

Hi Uwe,

2016-04-23 19:01 GMT+02:00 Uwe Brauer <address@hidden>:
> Sigh.
> In a nutshell and still as the responsible, official Xemacs auctex
> package manager, I would say:
> please consider a solution such that
>
> (if (featurep 'xemacs) dont-implement-that-feature)
>
> But don't make auctex incompatible with Xemacs in the sense that it
> cannot anymore byte compiled.

We already have hundreds of lines of compatibility code for XEmacs,
and some of them also applies to GNU Emacs 21.

> Outside that nutshell this calls for a rant. But I feel to tired (and I
> am too busy) for that.

Out of curiosity, based on your experience, are there AUCTeX users
running XEmacs?  Back in 2005, these lines were added to the AUCTeX
FAQ:

    Our success with XEmacs has been less than convincing. Code for core
    functionality like formatting and syntax highlighting tends to be different
    and often older than even Emacs 21.4, and Unicode support as delivered is
    problematic at best, missing on Windows. Both AUCTeX and XEmacs developers
    don’t hear much from active users of the combination. Partly for that
    reason, problems tend to go unnoticed for long amounts of time and are often
    found, if at all, after releases. No experiences or recommendations can be
    given for beta or developer versions of XEmacs.

After 11 years, the situation didn't improve much.  It's a bit awkward
to develop a code targeting a platform that you have the feeling
doesn't use at all your program.  Apart from you (thanks anyway for
your bug spotting work), we don't hear literally from anyone using
XEmacs.  You may say that we don't hear that much also from GNU Emacs
22-23 users, but usually we don't need much compatibility code to make
AUCTeX work on those Emacsens, so developing for those platforms
doesn't require extra work.

Bye,
Mosè