Hi,

> > I am just uploading a recompiled Emacs to ftp.ph.kcl.ac.uk. I split
> > up the Emacs-distribution into two parts:

> What exactly is this?  I'm asking because there is still a set
> called XEmacs for alpha 2 on the ftp site which is certainly way out
> of date and could be removed if a newer version of Emacs running
> under X is available.

A small lesson in computer history, as far as I remember it:

Once there was only one Emacs, but version 18 came to a point where
Richard Stallman decided that there had to be a major rewrite (see
`Antinews' in the info-docs for the changes), so Emacs 19.0 was born. 

By that time a company called Lucid needed an editor for their
development kit called `energize'. Instead of writing their own editor,
they took Emacs 19.0 and enhanced it for their own needs. Because of
the GPL this new Lucid-Emacs had to be GNU (i.e. free), too. 

Meanwhile the FSF wasn't lazy at all and by the time lemacs 19.11
(final version concerning Lucid) the FSF-Emacs was (I think) at
version 19.25. Unfortunately they were both too far away from each
other to be easily get merged (is this sentence English...?). Lucid
didn't want to develop it any further but lemacs was very popular, so
someone else decided to push it further: XEmacs was born.

Differences (AFAIK): 

- XEmacs has nice X-enhancements like support for pictures, tooltalk
(CDE Drag&Drop), sound and a button bar (the W3-bar looks *very*
similar to Netscape...). Internally it is somewhat more modern,
because Richard Stallman (a.k.a. rms) doesn't like the concept of
information hiding :((

- FSF-Emacs is much more stable and has AFAIK more internal
functions. Compiling XEmacs with several options can get quite tricky,
Emacs certainly has the better test&bugfix-team. Some features like
the Lucid-toolkit are already ported to Emacs.

I don't want to start an Emacs-vs-XEmacs-war here (go to
gnu.emacs.help for this). If there is demand for xemacs 19.14, I'll
try to compile it (it would be nice if the porter of the alpha-xemacs
could conatct me for this).

Bye,
Jochen

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