Is not the version published on emacsmirror about zenburn-emacs

[bbatsov]

The two version of the theme are developed independently and share no codebase. Mine happens to be cleaner and more actively maintained.

[dabrahams]

Well, if yours is more actively maintained, shouldn't it be the one on emacsmirror? The other one does at least one thing much better, I noticed: rendering diffs generated by magit.

[dbrock]

I have used zenburn.el on a daily basis for 8 years now, so it’s not exactly unmaintained—though I have sometimes been slow to incorporate patches, especially ones I can’t tell right away are good (and especially pre-GitHub).

As far as being unclean, your version looks pretty similar to me, so I’m not sure exactly what you’re getting at there. Do you mean that your version has styling for fewer packages? If you mean, e.g., that you just use one giant quasiquote whereas I use many small, or that you don’t bother with the foo-face aliases anymore, well, that just means you dropped some compatibility with older emacsen (I think it was Emacs 21 that couldn’t handle the gigantic quasiquote, for example). Which is fine, of course, but it’s not exactly a matter of cleanliness per se.

Don’t get me wrong here: I don’t mind forks, especially of something as subjective as a color theme. I’m only arguing a little because you seem to be implying that I might as well just drop my fork and switch to yours. Do you see what I mean? :-)

[dbrock]

(And, for the record, saying they share no code seems a little inaccurate if you compare this to this, or this to this, etc. Just sayin’!)

[dabrahams]

yes, that was clearly an overstatement.

[dabrahams]

(sorry, closing the issue was unintentional)

[bbatsov]

I didn't mean any disrespect - I appreciate all the work you've done with the theme. I was actually using your version the theme for a long time. I've naturally copied the color codes (since I was unlikely to come up with different values ;-) ) and most of the mode faces configuration since I don't use that many modes and wanted the theme to be of use to more people. By no code base sharing I meant that I've just taken the basic empty color-theme template and built the theme from scratch. I found some of the things you do (like the alias to face name translation) useless and the code was filled with some dubious bug fixes (probably submitted by users). When I last was using your theme I remember there was also a lot of use of colors not defined in the original zenburn theme.

I've never targeted any Emacs version before 23 so dropping some backward compatibility is fine by me. Hopefully this clears the matter.

[dbrock]

Thanks, and sorry if my message sounded a bit confrontational!

[tarsius]

Google told me about this conversation.

Since I mirror quite a few packages I can not investigate each an every package for which forks or even different implementations exist. I usually just mirror the version distributed by the author or maintainer listed in the file header (and ignore improvements by other people), or if they differ the older implementation (and leave it to the author causing the name conflict to do something about it).

In both cases this might not be the right choice but I depend on people pointing this out to me. If you do so, please be explicit about why I should mirror from a different source and especially summarize the positions of the various people involved.

So once this is resolved please let me know.

[dabrahams]

Based on what I've seen, you probably are already mirroring the right
package for emacs<23. There are just a few improvements, from a user
point-of-view, that should be migrated. Unfortunately, for emacs>=23,
https://github.com/djcb/elisp/blob/master/themes/zenburn-theme.el
might be the right choice. I'm not sure yet.

At Tue, 21 Jun 2011 12:16:33 -0700,
tarsius wrote:

Google told me about this conversation.

Since I mirror quite a few packages I can not investigate each an every package for which forks or even different implementations exist. I usually just mirror the version distributed by the author or maintainer listed in the file header (and ignore improvements by other people), or if they differ the older implementation (and leave it to the author causing the name conflict to do something about it).

In both cases this might not be the right choice but I depend on people pointing this out to me. If you do so, please be explicit about why I should mirror from a different source and especially summarize the positions of the various people involved.

So once this is resolved please let me know.

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
#8 (comment)

Dave Abrahams
BoostPro Computing
http://www.boostpro.com

[tarsius]

I favor >=23.2
Actually I stopped adding more color themes to the mirror because I will eventually stop mirroring those written for the old color-theme package.

[bbatsov]

My zenburn version is currently targeting the 23.x branch, but I'll modify it for 24.x as soon as it's declared stable. I don't really care if you're mirroring mine or Daniel's version. In both cases the community wins...

[dabrahams]

IMO, less confusion about where the best-working version can be found, and where to push the latest improvements, would serve the community better. I'm now finding that the version maintained by @dbrock has some issues, I think caused by the face alias clauses. For example, it customizes font-lock-xxx and then makes font-lock-xxx-face inherit that. But font-lock itself uses font-lock-xxx-face, so other themes come along and customize it, and zenburn can't override it.

Now, I've already contributed fixes upstream to @dbrock's version, but now I might switch. I'd really like to see this stuff resolved so that the community can know where to focus its efforts.

[Note: I'm even confused about the @bbatsov version(s) of zenburn: since emacs 23.3 supports load-theme, etc., I can conceivably do this without the color-theme package and use the version of zenburn you recommend for emacs24. I'm doing that now and it seems fine. ]

[bbatsov]

You're right about load-theme. load-theme is generally great with one exception - font inheritance doesn't seem to work properly there. Anything is better than the color-theme package, though. I'll add some clarifications in the README.md on the subject.

I see that more people are watching my version of the theme, so it might be a good idea to send patches there as well for the benefit of the community...

[tarsius]

I am now mirroring both versions. I am not happy about this. Daniel's version will eventually be removed unless it is ported to deftheme by the time emacs-24.1 is releases. If it actually is ported by then then I will have to flip a coin I guess. Or maybe you can merge by then or whatever - I still have hopes.