Blog - /Tech

I found a Ubuntu developer to work with on the emacs22 packaging effort for Ubuntu gutsy. Our shared work on the packaging may be obtained by doing:

bzr clone https://code.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-elisp/emacs/ubuntu

The URL https://code.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-elisp/emacs/ubuntu may be browsed if you want to receive email notifications whenever a change is made.

It is anticipated that the emacs22 package will get into gutsy sometime next week, pending approval from the Ubuntu archive administrator(s). I'm really excited about this!

I also have patches pending for the following Emacs Lisp packages. They will go into gutsy soon after emacs22 goes in.

• bbdb
• cedet (includes cedet-common, cedet-contrib, cogre, ede, eieio, semantic, and speedbar)
• dictionary-el
• emacs-goodies-el (includes debian-el, devscripts-el, dpkg-dev-el, emacs-goodies-el, gnus-bonus-el, vm-bonus-el)
• maxima (for its maxima-emacs package)
• nxml-mode
• w3m-el

I anticipate patching a couple of additional packages as well, such as sml-mode. The main reason for this effort is not just to make them depend on emacs22 as an alternative to emacs21 (since most of the packages had sufficient logic to handle this case), but also to make find-function work and to avoid creating unnecessary load-path shadows. Some packages also had important bugs that needed fixing, particularly cedet, which also had a new pre-release available upstream.

All in all, it has been a very rewarding week. Even if I did get flamed mildly by ESR for offering the "Wrong answer" to a off-topic question he had asked on a mailing list. I guess that's a milestone of sorts in a person's Free Software efforts ....