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Re: Compiler warnings

 

On 6/19/2010 6:26 AM, Tim X wrote:

I looked at some of the warnings. Although I may be wrong, I think a few
of them, especially the faces related ones and some of the ones with
wrong number of arguments are due to differences between GNU Emacs and
Xemacs. Not sure what we should do. Probably the most reliable method
would be to either test for type of emacs and call whichever is
appropriate. Another possiblity may be to break things up into xemacs
and gnu emacs code files - this might be particularly useful for the
faces stuff. While it has been sometime since I checked, there was
considerable difference between emacs and xemcs in that area (in fact,
emacspeak no longer works with xemacs largely because of this. Emacspeak
uses face information to alter speech properties. A sort of voice
locking, where different voices are used to indicate differences in text
in a similar way to colors ini font-locking. Differences in how xemacs
and emacs dealt with this area made it very difficult to maintain a
version that would run on both).

What we generally do is to define functions with vm- prefix, and put in vm-misc.el the case-based implementations for different versions of Emacs. If you look in lp:~reddyuday/vm/warnings, you will see a few definitions I have added to vm-misc.el. There are others there already.

The other thing I was wondering about is if there is any position on
backwards compatibility? Many of the warnings are probably due to
changes occuring in versions. While not a big issue yet, it is likely to
become more so as time passes. This could be especially so with the
improved support for multibyte characters and encodings etc. We probably
should have some standard on this so that anyone who wants to contribute
can make a call on whether they need to add code to support an older
version or just ignore possible negative impact on an older version in
exchange for cleaner and more maintainiable code for later versions. For
example, I would think only supporting emacs 21 onwards would be
reasonable for future versions. Anyone running emacs 20 or less (would
anyone be still running emacs 19?) can always stick with earlier
versions. Is this something we should canvas with the user community?

There is an older thread by Ulrich in the newsgroup, where we declared which version we will support for VM 8.2.0. I think Gnu Emacs 21 won't be supported.

BTW, did you get any response to your request for Xemacs user
assistance? Would be really handy to have an xemacs user to at least
test some of the work that will need to be done to cleanup some of those
compiler warnings.

No, I haven't received any responses.  The XEmacs users are a quite bunch.

On the other hand, I have negotiated with Aidan Kehoe on the XEmacs team that he will maintain the XEmacs package provided we won't give him more than two releases a year to work with. He is going to put in 8.1.1 right now. So, we will have another chance when we want to add 8.2.x.

There are a few XEmacs users who do download the recent releases. But it is hopeless to get them to do any work ahead of time. However, after downloading a release, they will no doubt report problems they run into.

Cheers,
Uday







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