Re: Whereto next?
Let's see whether this makes it through moderation to the list. I don't
think the message you replied to did.
"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen(a)xemacs.org> writes:
David Kastrup writes:
Out of idle curiousity, why *do* you bother to write? I would think
you would be a member of the Steve Yegge camp, aka the "the big
problem with XEmacs is that its developers don't know that the game
ended 5 years ago" camp.
<URL:http://www.lastblood.net/main/2007/12/03/page-108-cold-dead-hands/>
> The more you let yourself cut out, the more XEmacs becomes a
> playground for programmers with their own personal projects
There's nothing wrong with that if that's what the developers want to
do.
I don't know about you, but I profit a lot from a lot of people other
than me advancing the state of the art of Emacs, adding new features,
packages, functionality, ironing out existing inconsistencies. Working
and active ports widen the base of such contributions.
It is sort of the breath of a software project. A minimum of that is
necessary to cover the change of the times (ideas, operating systems,
libraries, compilers, desktop environments...), and be able to clean up
bitrot related with that before it creeps through all the place.
> forming a spotty feature landscape instead of an encompassing
> editing solution.
Being a spot on the feature landscape doesn't seem to harm the
popularity of vi, though.
"Spotty" is not the same as "spot". vi is focused. Emacs and XEmacs
aren't.
> Getting "back on track" is not useful if you
can't pick up speed.
That I agree with. One important question is whether it needs to be
in the same direction as Emacs, though.
An API and core synch does not determine the direction. It determines
whether you are interested in also harvesting efforts of people focused
on Emacs or not.
And it is not like having font-lock blow up all around you with regard
to both performance as well as functionality when editing files of
non-trivial size is a particular advantage you would want to keep
around.
> If you say that is not "stuff that's doable",
then you are having a
> problem in my opinion. Then we are more talking about "where do
> you want to stay today".
Problem, yes, although possibly one that can be ignored. Namely: the
obvious place to recruit XEmacs developers is from the Emacs
development community.
It is hard to recruit empty-handed.
Obvious solutions are not always good ones, though, and that one is
likely to get serious pushback from RMS and others on the lunatic
fringe of free software.
There are plenty of opportunities for badmouthing and namecalling in
Usenet nowadays, one does not need to join XEmacs development for that.
I can live with the company on the lunatic fringe of free software that
constitutes Emacs development. Many are passionate and hardworking on
the things they care about.
If we're not going to recruit there, maybe we don't need to
emulate as
much of the Emacs API as we have done in the past.
It is not a question of recruiting developers but of requisiting code.
You don't go far without the strength of picking even the low-hanging
fruit. We are purportedly not talking about last-ditch efforts here
where the followup costs are not heeded.
But "where do you want to stay today", no. Anybody who
follows Emacs
devel lists will see that "where Emacs is" is hardly a desirable place
to go for a modern development community. Just because I don't want
to go there is no evidence that I want to stay where I am today.
Stephen, I hate to say it, but I have seen quite more constructive and
well-argued and heeded contributions of yours on the Emacs developer
list than on the XEmacs developer list lately. I certainly appreciate
them (and I know others do as well). I think the most important place
where a "modern development community" wants to see itself is where
development happens and people benefit from it. Licensing,
philosophies, principles, policies: for many, all those take a second
seat. At one point XEmacs was the rallying point for those who just
wanted to get work done. Stagnation is just not appealing, whether you
call it "software freedom" or "modern development".
Software freedom at least offers a purportive motivation for gritting
your teeth and pulling through. But "modern development" is supposed to
be about not having to grit your teeth.
--
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum
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