Subject: Re: ale resurrection

From: Jim Blandy <[email-masked]>
Date: 12 Aug 2002 00:35:23 -0500

Loredana Lo Conte <[email-masked]> writes:
> I know too little to do anything at the moment. I don't want to make a
> commitment now because I don't know what is implied. But I am seriously
> looking at ale and if there is at least a minimum core working properly,
> it may be easier for either myself or someone else to jump on it and
> help.

I think Karl and I will be able to bring Ale to the point where the
features that it had back in 1995 work again.  (Assuming Emacs still
supports the redisplay features we used; Ale was pretty demanding.)

What would be required from you is to:
- learn Emacs Lisp (this is a lot of fun, not hard, and very
  empowering; I believe GNU Emacs is one of the Great Programs of the
  20th century)
- learn Ale (hopefully not too painful, but Ale is *not* one of the
  Great Programs of the 20th century)
- participate in discussions on the Ale mailing list 
- respond to bug reports
- encourage other people to do all the above
- make occasional releases, or draft good-hearted, reliable people
  into making them for you

I think that's about it.

Karl wrote a book about all this.

---

From: Jim Blandy <[email-masked]>
Date: 12 Aug 2002 12:12:50 -0500

Loredana Lo Conte <[email-masked]> writes:
> On 12 Aug 2002, Jim Blandy wrote:
> How much does Ale depend on emacs? Will it be possible to get people
> maintaining emacs to keep ale in mind and make sure that new releases
> are compatible?

I think the redisplay code is the area where Ale is most likely to run
into troubles with Emacs.  But in the past, the Emacs maintainers have
willing to incorporate all the changes we needed.

Naturally, when we need some entirely new behavior from Emacs, the
burden will be on us to implement it, and in a way Emacs's maintainers
approve of.  If we report a bug, the burden is to some extent on them
to fix it, but the process goes faster if we fix it ourselves and
provide a patch.  But generally all these things have gone smoothly.

> Which book? BTW, many thanks to Karl for his instructions to install
> subversion and Ale!

This book:

   http://cvsbook.red-bean.com/

The parts I was referring to are the odd-numbered chapters, about
open-source development, which don't seem to be available for free at
the moment.