[OS X Emacs] Aquamacs status update

[Win Treese]

To the Aquamacs community:

It's been a while since Aquamacs 3.5, and since I took over maintaining Aquamacs from David. It's time for a report to you about what's been going on.

In the big picture, I am planning new main releases now:

- First, Aquamacs 3.6, to fix the most common crashes and fix many of the noticeable problems in Aquamacs 3.5.
- Second, Aquamacs 4.0, to be based on the current version of Emacs, most likely a jump to Emacs 28

There seem to be a handful of bugs, mostly in memory management, that cause almost all the crashes in Aquamacs now. These seem to be worse on Catalina. There's been a lot of time in figuring out how to debug them from crash reports and learning the insides of the Emacs Mac code.

All of the bugs I know about are now in the Aquamacs issue tracker at https://github.com/aquamacs-emacs/aquamacs-emacs/issues. All of them are marked with a milestone, and I plan to tackle most of them for 3.6. At the moment, I hope to have a beta release out of 3.6 around the end of November.

Beyond 3.6, I think it will take a fair bit of work to update the code to be based on Emacs 28, so I don't have a target for 4.0 yet, except vaguely sometime in 2021.

At this point I don't expect there to be a version 3.7 unless we have some serious problems with 3.6.

I'm also wondering if we should give Aquamacs a more interesting default theme. Is anyone interested in working on that?

If you are interested in helping out, feel free to take on any of the issues in the bug tracker. I'd also appreciate any help reviewing the Aquamacs manual to make sure that it is current and correct.

Comments and suggestions welcome any time.

- Win

Win Treese
treese at acm.org
Aquamacs maintainer