Emacs on GNUstep (prerelease)

[Adrian Robert]

Hello emacs developers,

This is mainly an informational announcement right now, but some on 
this list may be interested to know of this work: I've released what 
I'm calling (for want of a better name) Emacs for *Step 8.0-pre1 
(GNUstep):

http://kamares.ucsd.edu/~arobert/GNUstep/emacs.html

This is a modification of "Emacs on Aqua" 
(http://emacs-on-aqua.sf.net), which traces its lineage back to an 
original port of GNU Emacs to NeXTstep by Carl Edman, which was 
successively modified for OpenStep, Rhapsody, and OS X, and updated 
most recently to emacs version 20.7.  Hence the 8.0 version number.

GNUstep (http://gnustep.org) is a free open source implementation of 
the OpenStep API and environment specification published by NeXT, that 
brings a number of modern enhancements such as anti-aliased text 
rendering, XML APIs, and (in development) themeable look and feel.  It 
also tries to implement features added by Apple (the acquirer of NeXT) 
as part of MacOS X where possible.

The Emacs release is "pre1" because there are still a number of 
outstanding issues both on GNUstep and OS X (see web page / README) 
for details.  Hopefully, I and the GNUstep community will be able to 
resolve these within a couple of months and
release 8.0 final for GNUstep and OS X.

If this happens, we will eventually be interested in trying to bring 
this port up to Emacs 21.  I have heard that there were a lot of 
internal changes to the Emacs graphical terminal code from 20 to 21, 
and therefore it may end up being easier to start from the current 
Carbon-based Emacs for OS X to do this.  My own thought was to use 
this for a reference, but to build on the *Step code,
which seems to be well-designed and thoroughly done (though in need of 
some cleanup after years of quick ports from NeXTstep to OpenStep to 
Rhapsody and so forth).  There may be copyright issues with the *Step 
code, though my preliminary investigations suggest things may be OK / 
resolvable here.

Any thoughts, suggestions, or reactions are welcome.

thanks,
Adrian Robert