Re: Yeah! Using instructions missing from the README, xemacs installed! (was Re: How can xemacs have been made so hard to install? Do the developers have any clue it is needlessly hard/undocumented?)
Ben Wing <ben(a)xemacs.org> writes:
that the current maintainers do not seem interested in putting in
the
time to fix some of the basic problems with documentation, broken
READMEs, a very out-of-date web site, etc. It is often claimed that
"there is no time" to work on these things. This is obviously a bogus
claim, however, because plenty of other things do get worked on, and
most of these things are much less important (but often more
interesting) than these basic maintenance issues.
It does not help to counter bogus arguments with other bogus ones.
The time to work on the web site is not exchangeable with time to work
on debugging and/or development. The website requires constant
attention while you can do development using the occasional
allnighter. Thus maintaining a website is much more likely to suffer
from job pressure etc.
However what I think is the major problem is access, just look at the
numbers (these are inaccurate guesses, but that is irrelevant).
10^6 users.
10^3 users of beta versions
10^2 xemacs-beta subscribers.
10 people with CVS access
2 release builders
1 guy (now 2) to maintain the website.
Development is shared over at least 10 persons, but the website hinges
on only one! If you look at other projects that do have their websites
in good shape (Debian, EGCS): They have their website under CVS too!
I think the problem is not that the documentation doesn't get written.
(Feel free to correct me, but I think that Didier's release
announcement and my README.packages are (for Unix builds) decent
getting started documentation). The problem is that the documentation
has not been getting to the right places, or at least much to slowly
(the website, the c.e.xemacs newsgroup, the ftp directory). Its mostly
on the xemacs-announce list, but nobody seems to read that.
For me long-term fixes look like
1. Ditch the xemacs-announce list (or at least gate it to
c.e.xemacs).
2. Stick the website under CVS and have the www.xemacs.org server
check it out every night.
Jan
P.S. Yes the package system (or more precisely the way they are
released and distributed) has serious problems, but I think the above
problems are more fundamental.