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Comment by uludag

6 days ago

I think this is a uncharitable take. I don't feel at all that the maintainers have this level of disdain for non-free OSes. Just type C-h n and you can see work done for non-free OSes (e.g. "'NSSpeechRecognitionUsageDescription' now included in "Info.plist" (macOS).")

I don't think there'd be pushback on bug fixes. I think it's only new features that would only exist on macOS that get pushback.

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uludag

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goranmoomin  6 days ago

As someone who have tried upstreaming a patch for Emacs on macOS (to add a feature that already existed on Linux), I can bitterly say that at least some of the maintainers do have a disdain for non-free OSes and that it makes it contributing patches for macOS as miserable as possible.

The patch was adding xwidget webkit support for macOS Cocoa[0], which I iterated for the next few months[1], only to side-rail into a discussion on macOS/GCC and GNUStep support policy[2], and I fizzled out.

That was abt 5 years ago, and I’ve never touched on the Emacs codebase since.

[0]: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2019-05/msg00...

[1]: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2019-07/threa...

[2]: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2019-08/msg00...

lvass  6 days ago

>I think it's only new features that would only exist on macOS that get pushback

Not even that anymore, it seems. https://xenodium.com/emacs-send-to-aka-macos-sharing-merged-...

  • rpdillon  6 days ago

    I mean, pretty much exactly that.

    > If you're wondering what was controversial about the patch, GNU guidelines discourage adding features targeting non-free operating systems before it can be made available for GNU/Linux. While the patch could be easily reworked to expose the native capabilities available for each platform, there's plenty of room for interpretation as to whether a rework is considered enough to satisfy the guideline. Most of the discussion was centered around this topic. Once the thread was refocused around shaping the patch, I received super constructive feedback and the patch was indeed reworked to cater for different platforms. We also agreed to rename the feature from "share" to "send". To my surprise, even RMS also chimed in on the patch discussion. Achievement unlocked?!

hollerith  6 days ago

I used Emacs on OS X (for 10 years, ending 4.5 y ago). Have you?

  • uludag  6 days ago

    Almost actually. My nine year anniversary is coming up this November. Obviously the experience isn't perfect (like the article mentions), but it's perfectly usable.

    You don't have to look hard to see that the Emacs maintainers aren't actively hostile to non-free OSes. Android is another good example. The Emacs manual states "it must be necessary to consider Android proprietary software from a practical standpoint." and yet a good amount of work went in to adding support for Android.

  • jrockway  6 days ago

    I have. Emacs has never felt actively hostile to me. Rather (as I describe above), running Emacs with a window system has always felt a little jank... free OS or otherwise. (Honestly, Windows is where I've had the best experience.)