Zapisnik sestanka čet 5. 12. 2024

We are developing a guix container definition for hosting Emacs with crdt package enabled to easily set up a public instance for real time collaborative text editing. With Org Mode and CRDT our system would provide advanced usage such as collaborative literal programming. Guix package would need some simple configuration, monst importantly a public domain name where the Emacs instance with crdt is accessible at.

Additionally, we would also make it very simple to publish the ORG documents as a website with Emacs live CMS package.

We want to make possible to author and publish on the web rich documents with software that is easy to mantain and extend. A strong point we are keeping in mind is accessibility. The prerequisite to using our system is an emacs installation collaborative editing + CMS editing/publishing and a guix installation (package manager, not system distribution neccessarily) for running the collaborative editing server / CMS hosting.

As users we tried out many things:

• etherpad
• hedgedoc
• gobi
• nextcloud
• google drive

We have been involved in the development of a collaborative web editing platform, the Yugofuturist manifesto, which we built with Drupal and etherpad. During the development we learned what obstacles collaborative realtime publishing brings and that got us motived to simplify the process.

Case study: https://www.drupal.org/case-study/yugofuturism-manifesto https://www.drupal.org/project/etherpad_api https://git.kompot.si/yufu/manifest

(cca 200h?)

• development:
  • guix container defintion
  • Emacs live CMS (Emacs package)
• documentation
• testing
• running a test instance and a production website

There are a lot web publishing projects but none are targeted at users that need something simple to use and setup. Wordpress makes it "easy" to create a website but more or relies on a large market of plugins and is not very simple to host; users are required to set up a web server, database, php and configure all those parts to work together. Or pay hosting providers to do it for them, which, apart from costs, introduces other limitations.

Collaborative text editing solutions are either similarily or harder to install. Yunohost, for example, makes it easier to install some of these solutions, but simply having Emacs is a lot more accessible. And most notably none of the solutions we tried (etherpad, hedgedoc, gobi, nextcloud, gdrive) offer the text editing experience that Org Mode provides.

While setup is easy to try out, the same solution could be used for a production deployment.

Providing all the expected functionalities with minimal amount of custom code requires deep understanding of all the existing facilities within base installation of Emacs and the 3rd party package ecosystem.

We are going to write the package in literate programming style for additional clarity and ease of use. A big emphasis is on documentation so that the system is both easy to setup, use and understand.

We are going to present it at our local emacs user group, inform the global emacs community (via emacs news), present it at EmacsConf 2025, host a website running this service that informs users how it works and how to set it up, share it via the fediverse (mastodon).