Previous: XEmacs, Up: A History of Emacs [Contents][Index]
Somewhere back in the late part of 2001 Steve Youngs was starting to become more and more dissatisfied and disillusioned with the direction that the XEmacs project was taking. Then late one, particularly dark, night, after consuming way too much coffee and smoking far too many cigarettes (there could have been alcohol involved too, the details are kind of fuzzy now...), he started having thoughts. Thoughts that, quite frankly, made him question his own sanity. The crazy notion of forking the XEmacs project was born that night.
It would be more than 2 years before Steve would even speak of the idea. I think he was scared that the men in the white coats would come and take him away if he did. But eventually he found some like-minded people and in the latter half of 2004 the SXEmacs Project became a reality. At this point we still hadn’t decided from where in the XEmacs code base we would fork from.
And then, on December 6th, 2004 at 03:24 (GMT) the XEmacs 21.4.16 source code was imported into SXEmacs’ main source repository. Three weeks later, SXEmacs was announced to the world in this post.
It should be noted that even though some feathers were ruffled by the fork, the dust settled very quickly. There is no animosity between the two projects. As a matter of fact, the SXEmacs maintainer (Steve Youngs) is still an active member of the XEmacs Review Board.
A time line for SXEmacs releases to date is...
Previous: XEmacs, Up: A History of Emacs [Contents][Index]