Re-including rst.el into Emacs repository

[Stefan Merten]

Hi Emacs developers!

I maintain `rst.el`. For some years now `rst.el` is also contained in
Emacs (at `lisp/textmodes/rst.el`). However, for various reasons I
were not able to maintain it in the Emacs repository.

This has now changed :-) . With the help of Stefan Monnier I am now an
Emacs developer. I consider it an honor to be allowed to contribute to
one of the oldest Free Software projects which at the same time is my
standard tool for so many tasks :-) .

Having this said I need to add that my involvement here will quite
likely focus on maintaining `rst.el`. I work on it once in a while and
meanwhile it is really useful. I will continue to maintain `rst.el` in
the Docutils project and I guess most feedback comes from there.

Well, "meanwhile" also means that I worked a lot on `rst.el` compared
to the version still in the Emacs repository. During the last few days
I merged the changes to `rst.el` into my development version so these
changes are already integrated.

Well, how to bring this large "patch" into the Emacs repository?
Usually in Free Software projects it's a best practice to submit small
patches. In this case this really makes no sense - the diff consists
of 288 hunks. May I commit simply the current version to Bazaar or is
there a better way? Also a review of the current version by you may
make sense.

According to the GNU Coding Standards I need to write a ChangeLog
entry. I don't see this makes much sense for such a large patch - at
least not in the way ChangeLog entries are done according to the GNU
Coding Standards. So how to construct a ChangeLog entry which complies
with the standards but makes sense?

My work at rst.el also resulted in some new features. Where to put a
description of these features? I think this will be most interesting
for a new version of Emacs.

I also wrote a number of unit tests for some aspects of `rst.el`
(nearly 6000 LOC) using the great `ert` framework. I looked around a
bit in the Emacs repository and discovered the `test` directory. Would
this be the right place to put my tests to? If so are there
established practices for such a case? If not I'd create a directory
`rst` there and put stuff there.

Since my tests need a buffer to operate on I also wrote some support
code for ert to allow tests on buffer contents. I didn't follow the
development of ert - may be something like this exists meanwhile. If
not this may be useful for others, too.

Finally a general question: On which mailing lists I am supposed to
subscribe as an Emacs developer? I just subscribed `emacs-devel` and
`bug-gnu-emacs`. Do I need to subscribe to `help-gnu-emacs` also? Any
others?


                                                Grüße

                                                Stefan

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