Re: Efforts to attract more users?

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Eli Zaretskii writes:

 > requests for changes.  The problem started when Lennart effectively
 > refused to modify his code according to the comments.

I acknowledge that, and I've been following emacs-devel for about a
decade now; my opinion of this case is *not* based on one or two
recent interactions.  See also my reply to Juanma.

 > IOW, if there is stubbornness, you will find plenty of it -- on
 > Lennart's side.

Lennart is one individual.  A individual non-committer's stubbornness
is not a problem; if you don't feel like dealing with it, just put him
in your killfile.  Emacs's stubbornness (assuming it exists) *is* a
problem; putting emacs-devel in your killfile just won't do.

 > It's a shame that Emacs development seems to lose Lennart's resources
 > of time and energy, but I really don't see how things could go
 > differently,

It's very easy to see how it could go differently.  Do what he asks,
on a case by case business.  Of course you have to get papers.  And
you have to reserve the right to make arbitrary changes to his
contributed code.  (That actually should go without saying, but in
this case it might be a good idea to make it explicit.)  But I suspect
that as long as it works he won't even check what you did to fit it
into Emacs coding style etc.

And finally, the code has to be worth making an exception.  Maybe I'm
misjudging what this is worth to Emacs; on that, I concede that you
and Juanma are far better judges than I ever will be.