Re: [PATCH] Xft patch reloaded, #3

Hrvoje> I'm personally using Mule (for Latin 2), and I'm not aware Hrvoje> of this huge list of XEmacs features broken under Mule. ms> Windows? That's both historically false and practically an irrelevant analogy. Historically, Mule did not break Windows. Windows broke Mule. Practically, Ben was one of the most important proponents of Windows and also the primary Mule developer; we could be pretty sure he would fix it, and he has done so. ms> They also offered (despite your claim to the contrary) on ms> fixing the breakage. They _did not_ make that offer. They offered to fix a list of things to get the patch in. But they want other people to find the problems, make the current list smaller, specify the issues, do the design, and suggest implementations for them. They obviously expect others to maintain any Mule-related aspects of the patch once the initial fixing is done. ***** As you say, we have a big problem here. Programmers are always biased in favor of high-quality features as defined by "works for me" rather than high-quality applications that work for everybody. This is the main reason why XEmacs 21.5 today is substantially farther from release than 21.2 was three years ago. It has _not_ benefitted at all from Martin's anal-retentive attention to bug-fixing (or yours to stat(2)-removal), it is noticably bigger and slower than 21.4 (disastrously so for Steve Y) but we don't know why, it is full of half-baked features---eg, no substantial improvements in the widgets, which Vin just disabled by default in 21.4!---most of which are bitrotting, and we're already heading further in that direction. Doesn't this bother you at all? Why are you fighting a request for some badly needed clean-up as the price of getting approval for a feature that will aggravate the need for the requested clean-up? -- 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.