Re: GNU Emacs as a lightweight IDE (seeking volunteers)

[Stefan Monnier]

Anand Tamariya [2021-02-04 12:30:08] wrote:
> *TLDR* I'm seeking volunteers for merging my changes to Emacs.

I'd be quite happy to see your new features merged into Emacs, indeed.
That'll take work, but I'd really like to see it happen.

> *Stage one (Testing)*Though I've been using this for over a year, I believe
> it can do with some testing by others.
> *Stage two (Minor changes)*I'll be accepting PRs for these to my github
> repo:
> *Stage three (Major changes)*This should be final merge with main. We would
> need to do it in small chunks over emails in this mailing list. However, we
> can't get to this stage before the other two stages as that might mean
> breaking the stability.

I don't understand what kind of "breaking the stability" worries on in
this regard.  Usually there aren't any serious conflicts between merging
patches into an upstream project and continuing development&refinement
of a downstream project.

IIUC you've been working on this for a while already, so I suspect you
have a good idea of which parts of your changes are "pretty stable" and
which parts aren't.

I suggest you start sending some small patches for inclusion right away.
I suggest you start small with obvious fixes, additional tests, code
clarifications, addition of helpful comments, docstring fixes, those
kind of things.

Most of us here are not very familiar with CEDET's code (I'm a bit more
familiar with it now, since I've been working on recently to convert it
to use `lexical-binding`, but its overall structure is still far from
clear to me), so it'll take time for us to understand your code enough
to review it, and I believe you're not very familiar with our habits
either, so it'll take some time for you to learn how to present your
patches in a way that we can accept them.  Those things work best when
starting with "easy stuff" and then work our way up from there.

> It's not a separate package as I believe this should be part of base emacs.
> So I developed it as such. Given that CEDET is part of Emacs, if you have
> ideas on packaging it as a separate package, I can use your help.

As you may know, I'm a big believer in separate packages, so I may end
up suggesting to make some things into separate packages, but I suspect
some parts of your changes will belong in Emacs itself anyway.

BTW, beside those small&simple patches, a good way to start might be
also to provide an overview of what the "total patch set" contains
(in terms of code more than in terms of user-level features).


        Stefan