Re: FYI: "Emacs and XEmacs" on the Emacs Wiki

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen(a)xemacs.org&gt; writes: You are talking about "legal hijacking". The GPL prevents that, of course. I was talking of control. Code which can only be understood and managed by an inner kabaal or single persons because of its inherent design decisions and resulting complexity is a much more absolute lock-in than even copyright. The "showdown" basically was that Richard refused to let major code pieces into Emacs which were complex or badly documented or haphazard enough that he could not understand them. It is a metric I tend to employ for projects under my responsibility as well: I consider myself intelligent enough that code that I don't feel able to get a hang of is ruled out from my projects as being too complex for too many people. And I think it eminently reasonable that Richard employs this metric for Emacs code: if he does not feel he can manage to understand stuff with the given level of documentation, it is very sane that it has to be reworked in structure and/or documentation before it goes in and becomes an unmaintained festering unmaintanable component at some future point of time. And the Lucid programmers basically said that: we want this in now, in the shape we consider fit, and under our control. You don't get to criticize or cherry-pick, you don't get to voice wishes, you don't get to review. Richard's choice given the options wise. Emacs does not have stasis areas where people are waiting for Richard Stallman, or Gerd Möllmann, or even Kenichi Handa to keep maintaining stuff they created and nobody else understands. Or where stuff is just sitting there in central places with a tendency to bitrot and blow up eventually, and needing patchwork maintenance in that case. -- David Kastrup _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://calypso.tux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta