Why isn't emacs installed by default

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le Lun 4 juin 2007 13:28, Andrew Haley a écrit :

> Can you please explain what you are talking about?  By "targets
> 1995-ish desktops," do you mean that emacs lacks pop-up windows,
> icons, menus, and so, on?  Or something else you desire?

I mean emacs does not use the current desktop font infrastructure,
does not use one of the main GUI desktop toolkits, does not support
cleanly i18n & our main encoding (UTF-8), does not integrate with the
accessibility infrastructure, does not integrate with the printing
infrastructure, and the list goes on and on.

That means emacs:
1. is unable to provide a lot of features current desktop users expect
(and that's not a question of eye-candy, a terrific amount of work
happened on the desktop these past years)
2. depends on a lot of stuff that must be kept working and configured
properly just for it.

First point is grounds for not being installed by default (already
happened). Second point is grounds for ultimately being kicked out of
distros altoguether (will take a few more years for the drag to become
unbearable)

Emacs may join the 21st century in the next decade. Till it does it's
squarely aimed at the museum.

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot