Álvaro Ramírez, whom I’ve a written a lot about lately because of his excellent Journelly app, just announced that an Emacs patch of his has been accepted and merged into Master. That sort of thing happens everyday, of course, but Ramírez’s contribution is unique because it started life as a macOS specific capability. The FSF’s way of punishing apostates who use macOS or other “non-free” software is to refuse to accept patches to Emacs that are specific to such software.
Because of this, Ramírez didn’t have much hope of having his patch accepted but he persevered nonetheless and, thankfully, it was accepted. He rewrote his patch to be a framework that would work on any OS if the necessary support modules were provided.
The patch, as originally conceived, was an Emacs interface to the the macOS share functionality. As accepted, the framework will do the same thing in any system that provides the necessary interface modules.
Like Ramírez, I’m grateful that Eli Zaretskii and Steven Kangas recognized the value of his contribution and worked to make it acceptable to the wider Emacs community. It’s not a groundbreaking change but it will make it a bit easier for us to meet our goal of being able to stay in Emacs as much as possible.
I’m not sure, and Ramírez doesn’t say, when his changes will appear. They’ve been merged into Master but I don’t know if that means they’ll appear in Emacs 30.2 or if we’ll have to wait to Emacs 31. Regardless, it’s a nice change and will make all our lives a bit nicer regardless of which operating system we’re using.