jla@AI.MIT.EDU (Joseph Arceneaux) (07/26/90)
Recently there was an enquiry about the target release date of Emacs version 19. First let me point out that one of the advantages of working on GNU is that we don't feel we have to make those lies called delivery dates. Nevertheless, I'd sort-of hoped to be farther along by now. Although I should personally take some of the blame because of my penchant for trying to implement too many nifty hacks, a serious delay has been caused by the recent threat of legal action, reported earlier in this forumn. Because of this nasty behaviour, we are currently rewriting some major parts of emacs (both verisions 18 and 19) to remove all possible resemblance with Gosling's original version. This has been time consuming, although these changes have resulted in some improvements--for example, undo is much cleaner and no longer statically limited in size. Hopefully this activity will soon be finished, and I can then proceed with the last (he he) addition to Emacs 19, probably the integration of menus and keymaps. After this, a couple of months of debugging will probably be neccessary. I already have a sizable alpha-test list, so please don't send me such requests. Thanks for your patience.