At 10:38 AM 10/4/00 -0400, Rafe Colburn wrote:
> I'm curious whether anyone has JDE working with XEmacs 21.1 under
> Windows NT 4.0. I get an error when XEmacs starts up (regular Emacs
> works fine), and I haven't been able to get any help on the list.
>
> At this point, I'm wondering if anyone has gotten this combination to
> work at all. If not, I'll stop trying :)
Hi Rafe,
The Windows NT version of XEmacs has many problems, one of which is fatal
to its use with the JDE, namely it does not launch subprocesses (e.g., Java
applications) correctly. That is why there is a warning in the requirements
section of the JDE website against using the JDE with this version of
XEmacs. Also, if you search the JDE mailing list archives, you will find
extensive discussions on this topic, explaining in detail the problems with
the NT version of XEmacs. The problem with launching subprocesses is
long-standing (going back two years at least) and the NT XEmacs team seems
unwilling or incapable of fixing it. If you need to develop on Windows, do
yourself a favor and use GNU Emacs. It's not so bad. Really.
Personally, I'm very disappointed in the problems with NT/XEmacs as I'd
like to be able to use it, if nothing else, to ensure that JDE features
work with XEmacs (Windows is my primary development platform). However,
I've found it unusable. The doc for functions doesn't work. In recent
releases, XEmacs won't even start up on a system, including mine, if it
has certain common Windows drivers installed due to memory management
conflicts. I had to install an earlier version to get it to even come up on
my system. In my experience, NT/XEmacs becomes unstable after 10-5 minutes
of use, perhaps because of memory leaks.
I remember well the port of GNU Emacs to Windows and the struggle the
NT/Emacs team had resolving Windows issues, including getting subprocesses
to launch correctly. However, the Emacs port was not anywhere near as
painful and long drawn out has the XEmacs port has been to date, with the
end still not in sight as far as I can see.
The last time I looked at NT/XEmacs was about four months ago so things may
have improved since then. However, I monitor the NT/XEmacs mailing list and
I still see references to the startup problem so I'm assuming it has not
been fixed. If things have improved, I'd certainly be happy to take another
look at NT/XEmacs.
- Paul
> The past bug reports I've sent are in the archives at:
>
> http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg03386.html
>
> http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg03009.html
>
> Thanks,
> Rafe
