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Date: Mon, 7 Apr 1997 17:37:11 -0700 (PDT)
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To: David Moore <dmoore@ucsd.edu>
Cc: xemacs-beta@xemacs.org
Subject: xemacs "flavours" of packages
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David Moore writes:
 > 
 > What is our policy with making XEmacs specific changes to packages?  For 
 > example, if we added defcustom's to efs (and no efs maintainer was on
 > the list) is there a mechanism in place to get that information back to
 > the maintainer?  If said maintainer has disappeared off the face of the
 > earth, how should we change the version number?  Clearly, we should
 > change the version number, but how?  And is a change in version number
 > being enforced?
 > 
 > Especially things such as supporting custom.el seem like obvious changes
 > to get propagated back to maintainers, as that it's available in GNU
 > Emacs and XEmacs (at least in the future and tiny backward-compat
 > modules exist).
 > 

Timely question.

I've added custom support to the package I support (a mode for editing
Verilog programs) and hung it at Custom->Emacs->Programming->Languages
which you'll agree is the right place.

What I am getting afraid of is that this spot is going to get lost in
the sauce what with all the other customize things (man mode, (go
Hrvoje Niksic!)  and so on.)


% cd /usr/local/x20/lib/xemacs-20.1-b11/lisp
% ls -1 */*.el.gz | wc -l
    1015

There are 1015 elisp files; if every one of those gets a customize
menu, we are going to get lost!!!

So, what to do?

Possibility one: How about someone whip up some code that places in
	the Help pulldown a pointer to the customize item for the
	mode the current buffer is in??

	It could be labeled "Customize Text Mode" or whatever as
	appropriate. Users then can simply go to the Help pulldown to
	see if a particular mode has custom support, without needing
	to guess where such support might be cataloged.

Possibility two: We set a coding style that states that modes that
	define a Menubar item and use Custom, shall insert a pointer
	to the Customize item for that mode in their Menubar. 

	[And someone whips up a code snippet that we can all copy and
	insert into our modes that implements this, and does it in
	such away that the Right Thing happens if the user doesn't
	have custom???

-mac



