Re: What a modern collaboration toolkit looks like

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hi, Miles!

On Mon, Dec 31, 2007 at 10:24:25PM +0900, Miles Bader wrote:
> Alan Mackenzie <address@hidden> writes:
> >> Yet a third is that when we decide to do it, we can converge on a
> >> releasable state with almost absurd ease.  Like, Ivanovic (our
> >> release manager) will announce "Point release scheduled this coming
> >> Wednesday" and everyone will pretty much flip into bug-stomping
> >> mode.  The tracker bug list tends to shrink dramatically when this
> >> happens -- not only do we get prepared for release but *we know
> >> we've done so*.

> > Eric, how well do you think this could work at all for Emacs?

> I suspect that 90% of the difference in "responsiveness" between the
> two projects has to do with the people (and numbers of people)
> involved, not with the tools being used.

What about the code base?

> Emacs has a rather small developer base, and most of the developers
> are fairly busy with other things.  A project with lots of developers
> that are more intensely involved in development is naturally going to
> be more reponsive.

> Certainly the tools make _some_ difference, but I think ESR is
> drastically overestimating how much of one.  If Emacs development were
> at a faster pace (perhaps because the developer base change), then
> maybe the tools would become a limiting factor, but I don't think they
> are now.

My feeling is that better tools would make a substantial difference -
perhaps 25% better productivity for me - but nothing like an order of
magnitude.

Miles, why aren't we all switching to arch?  Would it be appropriate for
Emacs now?

> [BTW, one thing I think _would_ be very handy, and easy to implement,
> would be an IRC channel for Emacs developers, just for those random
> questions you wanna get a quick answer to sometimes... There's #emacs
> on irc.freenode.net, but it's more user-level.]

Would anybody be listening?

> -Miles

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).