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: I apologize for talking about you in the third person, and presuming to guess what you're thinking. Jan> It does not help to counter bogus arguments with other bogus ones. As I read it, Ben very well understands. But he's not a management consultant to be able to express his misgivings about the organization of XEmacs.org in 25 terse words. I expect he's frustrated at not being able to match us word for word, but I'm glad he's directed his effort at "Architecting XEmacs", instead, and I suppose you are too. If you look around, eg, at Mozilla.org (and AbiSource.com is borrowing the technology) with its Bonsai or Debian.org with their huge organization and formal induction of maintainers, you see a trend toward explicit and open organizational structures. I don't have any complaint about the openness of xemacs-review; I personally have never been treated with anything but courtesy, and always received the information I requested, when I've dealt with the review board. But explicit it is not. I believe you, Jan, have CVS check-in authority, but I'm not sure and I don't know what you have veto over. I've been told that Hrvoje vetoed some of my patches, but I don't know why, or why he has a veto in that area. I'm sure I'd get an answer if I asked[1]; but nowhere is this stuff written down. I have no strong opinion about whether XEmacs needs more formal organization, but Ben certainly does (at least to the extent of rationalizing the mail aliases at XEmacs.org). I think "whether", "how much", and "how to" deserve discussion at this point, in view of several failures of organization over the last few months. Jan> Development is shared over at least 10 persons, but the And don't forget that Lisp packages have been offloaded onto individual maintainers in many cases. Jan> website hinges on only one! If you look at other projects Jan> that do have their websites in good shape (Debian, EGCS): Jan> They have their website under CVS too! Yup. To be fair, Ben asked for this in a rather early version of "Architecting XEmacs," IIRC, and it is certainly there now. His motivation was surely enabling more people to revise and add documentation on the Web site. Jan> I think the problem is not that the documentation doesn't get Jan> written. For Mule it most certainly is; I can take some responsibility for that. I've done some but not as much as I would like to have done. It's downright ugly in there.... Jan> P.S. Yes the package system (or more precisely the way they Jan> are released and distributed) has serious problems, but I Jan> think the above problems are more fundamental. As I read Ben, he agrees in some sense. Footnotes: [1] And I can make a very good guess, of course, which is why I haven't asked. The point is it's not been made explicit; the patch just never got applied. -- University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091 __________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________ What are those two straight lines for? "Free software rules."