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Re: Release plans
From: |
Alan Mackenzie |
Subject: |
Re: Release plans |
Date: |
Mon, 18 Aug 2008 10:18:02 +0000 |
User-agent: |
Mutt/1.5.9i |
Morning, Stephen!
On Mon, Aug 18, 2008 at 09:01:54AM +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> Alan Mackenzie writes:
> > I wasn't talking about a scientific process for which evidence can
> > be weighed up.
> Shouldn't you be? Surely you know it is possible to quantify risk,
> and analyze it scientifically?
OK, but it is like the blowing up of a nuclear reactor, not a plane
crash. You don't say "hey, no reactors of type XYZ have blown up,
therefore it's safe"; instead, you analyse the way it's made and run, and
probe for potential chains of failures. With a plane crash, on the other
hand, you can say "a plane of type UVW only crashes every 100,000,000
flight hours, so you'll be OK.".
> Why do you ask that we on your nightmares, or Richard's, to guide
> policy?
I don't ask anyone to we on my nightmares. ;-) I think you missed a
word out.
[ .... ]
> Are you beginning to see how untenable your position is?
No. It may well be that, after more rigorous analysis, loadable binaries
in Emacs might not be a problem. But being wrong is a long way from
being untenable.
> In fact the only thing it has going for it is
> > Richard is a master of nasty deviousness, so the fact that he sees a
> > problem is reason in itself to take it seriously. ;-)
> but that's genuinely ad hominem.
Yes, but it's not an a.h. attack. It's an a.h. compliment.
> > The essential point is that if an un-free Emacs became established
> > through the mechanism of loading binary libraries, we could not
> > easily reverse it.
> Huh? All you have to do is write the patch and announce a release.
> Richard has done that before (the security patch a couple years ago).
"Huh?"? Such a patch would do nothing to disestablish an established
un-free version.
> A couple of corrections:
> > I think you said recently that there's an obscure patch around
> > which
> The patch is to Emacs, and it's obscure only because it has been
> refused inclusion in Emacs with extreme firmness, so that its
> proponents gave up about five years ago. In XEmacs 21.4 and later,
> it's as simple as ./configure --with-modules. ....
> > That's very different from something being a core feature,
> > encouraged by the prime maintainers.
> Well, in XEmacs, the module loader *is* a core feature encouraged by
> the maintainers. It's not configured by default because demand is so
> far low.
Those two sentences seem to contradict eachother. I can't find any
documentation for it in either of the manuals (XEmacs 21.4.17) or NEWS.
I even know it exists, and I've even got a solid search term ("loader"),
but I still can't find it. That's hardly encouragement.
How much use has been made of this module loader in XEmacs? What's it
been used for?
> In SXEmacs, FFI is configured by many users because packages
> are downloaded not by EFS as in XEmacs, but via a FFI interface to
> libcurl implemented entire in Lisp.
I've just had a look at the SXEmacs home page, having not previously been
aware of it. I can't really see any reason for SXEmacs's existence.
--
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).
- Re: whither GNU, (continued)
- Re: Release plans, Stephen J. Turnbull, 2008/08/16
- Re: Release plans, Thomas Lord, 2008/08/16
- Re: Release plans, Alan Mackenzie, 2008/08/16
- Re: Release plans, Stephen J. Turnbull, 2008/08/16
- Re: Release plans, Alan Mackenzie, 2008/08/17
- Re: Release plans, Stephen J. Turnbull, 2008/08/17
- Re: Release plans,
Alan Mackenzie <=
- Re: Release plans, Stephen J. Turnbull, 2008/08/18
- Dynamic loading (was: Release plans), Stefan Monnier, 2008/08/18
- Dynamic loading (was: Release plans), Stephen J. Turnbull, 2008/08/18
- Re: Dynamic loading, Stefan Monnier, 2008/08/20
- Re: Dynamic loading, joakim, 2008/08/20
- Re: Dynamic loading, Stephen J. Turnbull, 2008/08/25
- Re: Dynamic loading, Richard M. Stallman, 2008/08/26
- Re: Release plans, Alan Mackenzie, 2008/08/18
- Re: Release plans, Johannes Weiner, 2008/08/18
- Re: Release plans, Alan Mackenzie, 2008/08/19