Re: Emacs rewrite in a maintainable language

[Paul Eggert]

Daniel Colascione wrote:
> Consider my recent change to add finalizers to elisp. I saw a need for
> the feature and just implemented it directly in Emacs. What would the
> equivalent be in a guilemacs world? I'd have had to make the change
> upstream in guile (where I suspect the process is much more involved),
> wait for a stable release of guile, added Emacs support, and then still
> not have been able to rely on the feature until Emacs dropped support
> for the last version of Guile to lack the feature.

This is a reasonable objection. Perhaps we could overcome it the same way we 
overcome a similar problem with Emacs and Gnulib. When you need to make a change 
involving Gnulib code in Emacs (say, to the file lib/time.in.h), there isn't a 
problem: you can just change lib/time.in.h in the Savannah git master for Emacs. 
At some point a gnome comes along, notices that the Emacs copy of lib/time.in.h 
disagrees with the Gnulib copy, and merges the two.

We could do the same for Guile. That is, the Emacs savannah git could contain a 
copy of the relevant Guile sources (presumably only a subset of the Guile source 
code would be needed, just as only a small subset of Gnulib is needed). There 
would be an established procedure to merge the two when they become out of sync; 
for Gnulib, this is partly automated by Emacs's admin/merge-gnulib script.

For Gnulib I'm the gnome. For this process to work well with Guile, we'd need a 
gnome or two for Guile.