Development
From the project's beginnings, the developers of XEmacs aimed to have a frequent release-cycle: currently 2 to 3 releases appear per year, which is a slowdown from earlier years. They also aimed for more openness to experimentation, and XEmacs often offers new features before other emacsen — pioneering (for example) inline images, variable fonts and terminal coloring. Over the years, the developers have extensively rewritten the code in order to improve consistency and to follow modern programming conventions stressing data abstraction. XEmacs has a unique packaging system for independently-maintained Lisp packages. The latest version has GTK+ support and a native Carbon port for Mac OS X.
XEmacs has always had a very open development-environment, including anonymous CVS, later Mercurial access and publicly accessible development mailing-lists. XEmacs comes with a 500+ page internals manual (Wing, et al., 2004).
The XEmacs project has a policy of maintaining compatibility with the GNU Emacs API. For example, it provides a compatibility-layer implementing overlays via the native extent functionality. "he XEmacs developers strive to keep their code compatible with GNU Emacs, especially on the Lisp level."
Support for Unicode has become a problem for XEmacs. As of 2005, the released version depends on the unmaintained package called Mule-UCS to support Unicode, while the development branch of XEmacs has had robust native support for external Unicode encodings since May 2002, but the internal Mule character sets lack completeness, and development seems stalled as of September 2005.
XEmacs development features three branches: stable, gamma, and beta, with beta getting new features first, but potentially having less testing, stability and security. The developers released version 20.0 on 9 February 1997, and version 21.0 on 12 July 1998. As of January 2009, the stable branch had reached version 21.4.22 and the beta branch version 21.5.28. No gamma releases exist as of 2007. With the release of XEmacs 21.4.0, version numbers follow a scheme whereby an odd second number signals a development-version, and an even second number indicates a stable release.
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