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Subject: The future of XEmacs
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From: Steven L Baur <steve@miranova.com>
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Date: 08 Dec 1996 20:20:30 -0800
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Commentary on the bench marking.

I'd like to see some more bench marking done, particularly on
non-Linux platforms.  But my results clearly show no performance
degradation in the way of display speed in v20.0 w/out Mule as
compared to 19.14.

The proposal has been made to dump XEmacs 19.15 entirely and go
straight to v20, with --with-mule=no as the default for the first
binary releases.  I'd like to get some feedback before committing in
any direction.

The Pros:
* Working in two source trees is a dirty, ugly, time-consuming
  error-prone task.  I'm already sick of it.  By going straight to
  20.0 we drop the second superfluous source tree.

* There appears to be little or no performance degradation by running
  with v20 w/out Mule extensions.  The next release will be speeded
  up, and won't be released until it is.  This kind of work is quite
  tedious, and concentrating on only one source tree to fix is a big
  win.

* There has been much testing of the v20 code by Martin Buchholz and
  his crew at Sun Micro.

* The 19.15 source tree is an evolutionary dead-end, and will be
  abandoned anyway by 2Q97.

The Cons:
* Much of the code in v20 is younger than code in v19.  In a program
  the size of XEmacs, that means there are plenty of bugs we haven't
  found yet.

* I've used 19.15-b3 heavily every day for the last 3 months, and have
  a `warm, fuzzy' feeling about it.  For my usage (Gnus for email &
  news, html/perl CGI editing) it is extremely stable.


All in all, I'm leaning very heavily towards ditching 19.15, so if
there are any objections, speak now or flame me in comp.emacs.xemacs
for the next 3 years ;-).

While I'm on the subject ...

There *will* be a release of 19.15-b3 even if it's the final release
of XEmacs v19.  19.15-b3 and 20.0-b31 should be released in the coming
week, but I make no commitments as to a specific day.
-- 
steve@miranova.com baur
Unsolicited commercial e-mail will be billed at $250/message.
"Bill Clinton is a bore.  He doesn't have a creative bone in his
body."  -- David Brinkley

