Re: [PATCH] support a few of the new features of C++11 in syntax highlighting

[Óscar Fuentes]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

>> > Then I guess the question is "why keep doing that?"  IOW, why not
>> > develop it as part of Emacs?
>> 
>> CC Mode also feeds into XEmacs.  This would be more difficult to do if CC
>> Mode were an integrated part of Emacs rather than being independent of
>> both.
>
> I don't see how would this be more difficult.  In both cases, one must
> checkout a foreign branch and integrate it into the tree.
>
>> There are distinct advantages with working with a small code base on a
>> stable base (a released version of Emacs) as compared with being in the
>> thick of a "major war" (an upcoming version of Emacs, which doesn't even
>> build all the time).
>
> See my proposal to use a separate public branch within the Emacs
> repository, which takes care of all this.

The major advantage of maintaining cc-mode on a Emacs branch would be to
easily (trivially?) re-create the history of the changes on cc-mode when
those are merged into Emacs. So from the point of view of those of us
that always work with the cc-mode integrated on the latest Emacs, it
would be the obvious workflow. But for those users and contributors with
older Emacs versions, working with/on the latest cc-mode version would
be more inconvenient. Alan would be inconvenienced too as he has to
develop/test cc-mode against multiple Emacs versions.

So I guess that merging cc-mode into Emacs (a specific branch of Emacs,
to be precise) would become very easy, but all the rest would be more
inconvenient, as long as the cc-mode development cares about past Emacs
versions.