Re: Emacs rewrite in a maintainable language

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Cc: address@hidden, address@hidden
> From: Przemysław Wojnowski <address@hidden>
> Date: Fri, 16 Oct 2015 21:34:19 +0200
> 
> W dniu 16.10.2015 o 18:11, Eli Zaretskii pisze:
> > In any case, Emacs can never be satisfied with the current Guile
> > infrastructure for i18n.  There are too many shortcomings, some of
> > them were mentioned here.  Yes, Guile can be fixed to be better in
> > that area, but no one is working on that, AFAIK, and what's more
> > important, lead Guile developers don't even agree Guile should move in
> > that direction.  (This especially puzzles me: to have a good example
> > before you and not follow it?  Emacs learned what it has now the hard
> > way, have paid in blood, sweat and tears for that knowledge, and still
> > Guile developers think they "know better"?  Present parties excluded,
> > of course.)
> 
> Is i18n the only obstacle?

The only major one I know of.  There are quite a few minor ones, which
will also have to be handled.  In general, Guile is much less portable
to non-GNU/Linux systems than Emacs.

> IOW if someone would improve Guile's i18n infrastructure to match that of
> Emacs, would it be included into Emacs?

Including Guile in Emacs is a project by itself, regardless of
features missing from Guile itself.

> To be clear, I'm not asking to make a pressure on you, but only in context of
> motivation. If someone would know that i18n is the only obstacle, maybe this
> person(s) would find motivation to do the job. Without that it is 
> discouraging.
> 
> This way or another, a clear decision would be helpful here. "Yes, we want
> if...", "No, we don't want, because...". At least it would clarify everything
> and close the topic.

Theoretically, there's no problem: Guile is _the_ GNU extension
language, so accepting it in Emacs is a no-brainer.

Practically, I see no reason to make any decisions until someone comes
up and publishes a repository where all the necessary work has been
done.  There's a person working on that, on and off, but that job is
far from complete.