In April 2002, I merged my Mac OS X code with the development
version of the Emacs source code maintained at the
Emacs CVS
repository. Since then, anyone who is interested in the lastest
development version of Emacs for Mac OS X can obtain it by anonymous
CVS. All of this Mac OS X code was original and written by myself, or
adapted from my own port of Emacs 21 to Mac OS 8/9. Since then,
Steven Tamm has contributed the make-package script and some code for
event handling, and various fixes. Nozomu Ando has contributed fixes
to unexmacosx.c, changes to build with
the --with-x option (including the use of dynamic X11
libraries), and various fixes. A number of people have contributed
various small fixes.
This latest version of Emacs for Mac OS X in the CVS repository
contains many improvements and bug fixes that have been added since I
released a patch for building Emacs 21.1 on Mac OS X in November 2001.
It is continually being improved, although unfortunately we don't have
many developers to work on it. I invite everyone to test and use the
CVS version and update as often as possible to avoid discussing bugs
on mailing lists that have already been fixed. Please note that
although it is quite stable, this is a development version and you
will need to put your own effort into finding out how to build,
install, and use it.
Due to lack of time and resources, I cannot provide a binary
distribution. I will try to provide a binary distribution when the
Mac OS X code is part of a standard distribution of Emacs,
which will probably be version 21.4. There may also be binaries of
pretests of that version before then.
It is trivial to provide binary distributions of Emacs for Mac OS X on
the Web by building the code from CVS using
the mac/make-package script or constructing an
application bundle using the method described in the FAQ.
Unfortunately many people who do this on the Web do not update their
binary distributions often enough, which causes users of these
distributions to report problems that have long been fixed. Before
you report a bug, you will help the developers a lot by testing on the
latest version of the CVS code first.