Re: Cut and paste in Cygwin XEmacs

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> >>>>> "Rick" == Rick Rankin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>
>     Rick> they *first* make sure that their Cygwin installation is
>     Rick> completely up to date.
>
> That makes sense.
>
> My problem is that as a non-Windows user/developer I can only really
> recommend what I have been told definitely works.  I find Windows very
> unfriendly to support, because every time I get close to the answer to
> the question I'm really asking, Windows Help says "Please contact your
> System Administrator"!  I think Microsoft is trying to sell me an MCSE
> correspondence course.  :-(  And the XEmacs Windows-specific docs are
> not all that much better.
>
>     Rick> Perhaps even install a snapshot cygwin1.dll because problems
>     Rick> are being fixed all the time.
>
> Problem is, if they go beyond current release, APIs might change,
> right?

Not really, at least not in my experience. Certainly the POSIX-compliant
APIs shouldn't change. There are some Cygwin-specific API calls, but I
wasn't aware that there was ever that much churn in them. But then again, I
don't use them that much. Without looking at the XEmacs code in more detail,
I'm not sure why it would need to make use of the internal calls. There's
only a handful of them, and the majority of them deal with path handling, so
unless XEmacs is doing conversions from POSIX-style paths to Windows-style
paths, then calling the native Windows API functions with the Windows-style
path, they're not really much use.

Chris Faylor, the Cygwin lead developer, has always maintained that the DLLs
are *supposed* to be binary compatible, i.e., if it works on 1.3.x, it
should work on 1.5.x. I used XEmacs 21.4.x compiled against Cygwin 1.3 on
Cygwin 1.5 for quite a while with no significant problems before I rebuilt
against Cygwin 1.5. However, it's certainly true that an application built
against Cygwin 1.5 will not work on Cygwin 1.3.

> My understanding is that a lot of the problem with XEmacs on
> Cygwin (and Windows XP, for that matter) have to do with use of older
> APIs that didn't really work right, so they've been replaced.

Possible, I suppose. Without more detail, I can't speak to that issue.

>
>     Rick> the Cygwin people don't keep old distributions around, so
>     Rick> they're pretty hard to come by.
>
> Shoulda figured that.  OK, scratch that recommendation.
>
>     Rick> Well, I've been wanting to take a more active role, at least
>     Rick> in terms of finding and fixing problems. I don't know if I'd
>     Rick> have time to work on new features, though. Hmm... guess I'll
>     Rick> have to think about learning lisp ;-)
>
> Believe me, just having a reasonably experienced user/developer,
> somebody who's actually been working with XEmacs on the platform over
> the last couple of years, speaking up in c.e.x and other XEmacs
> channels is a _major_ contribution.
>
> Andy and Ben are very good at what they do, but neither has a
> support-type personality, and Andy's stuff (most of the GUI,
> especially on Windows) is basically undocumented outside of the
> sources.  As is the netinstaller -- after the platform changes (new
> Cygwin, Windows XP), I'd say one of our biggest problems on Windows is
> that people's packages installations get wedged because the
> netinstaller and XEmacs's native package management disagree slightly
> on how things are done.
>
> While I can't give you a shopping list at the moment, if you want to
> invest some of your spare time in XEmacs, hang out a bit on c.e.x and
> xemacs-beta (I haven't checked recently, but I think most of the
> traffic from xemacs-winnt moved to -beta), and help us build up
> Google-able archives of Windows wisdom.
>

Well, I'm not exactly a support-type personality, either. I always figured
that 5 minutes in any support organization would be enough to get me fired
;-) I've been subscribed to both xemacs-winnt and -beta for a while, but I
don't read the newsgroups too often, once or twice a week, mabye. Time
permitting, I'll try to answer Cygwin-related questions. I don't use the
native version at all, so I won't be much help there, but it seem's like
Adrian answers many of those.

> Of course if you can help us with the XEmacs vs. Cygwin 1.5/Windows XP
> issues, that would be really great.

Is there a list of issues somewhere? I see them come up on the mailing
lists, but if I'm not experiencing (or haven't experienced) the issue, or if
they occur in areas of the program I don't use (gnus, mail, etc.), I often
don't pay too much attention to them.

--Rick