Re: why does M-w (kill-ring-save) hurt so bad?

Stephen> So who's going to bell the cat? ms> This is beyond my understanding of English. :-) Could you ms> rephrase? There's an old fable about the mice deciding to put a nice loud bell on the cat for reasons of public safety, but all the mice decline the honor of actually facing the cat. There's a more modern analogy, of managing programmers to herding cats. ms> I was (and am) happy with the general direction of the change, ms> just not with its consequences, so this isn't likely to have ms> gotten caught by review. Ah, OK. Actually on rereading that's clear from your original post; I have to wonder if I've been in Japan too long to be considered a native speaker of English, myself. :-þ I still think we have a process problem here, but I'll see what I can do about minimizing burden on programmers before making any suggestions. Jamie's implicit proposal ("everybody spend one hour thinking about impact on Jamie for every two hours at the keyboard") is insane, of course. Having some one person write the NEWS is by far most efficient, I think (even though I dislike the task a lot), but it's too easy to miss these little nuances. I'm not sure how to construct a compromise that catches this kind of thing cheaply. And then there's the perennial "if we'd get the release cycle down to 6-9 months, Jamie could just blow up once per release cycle" strategy. ms> I'm not sure Ben was. I suspect that Ben did this on purpose. The "make life bearable for MS users" was the original motivation; the fact that the default in question is global smacks of "it's good enough for everybody". -- Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Ask not how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software.